Jimmy_D

How are Russia so bad at this?

Congratulations, you’re officially more optimistic about the way things are going for Russia than Russian State TV

Interesting, Russian State TV actually acknowledging that it’s Ukraine, backed by NATO weapons and training, rather than NATO themselves in this one. Wonder if that’s a deliberate change or if the host will want to avoid high windows for a while.

Blimey. Really felt like we went into this one with no confidence at all. At least we're the first team in months to keep Haaland down to one goal, and we're having a better day than Putin? Loss wasn't unexpected, to say the least, but there's a fair bit of pressure on the next couple of games now. Hopefully we can find some of the aggression we had between the Leeds and the Chelsea games.

There's one frame at 13 seconds on that video that seems to suggest against the truck bomb theory. The camera clearly being affected by the attack before any indication that anything has happened to any vehicles.

Still incredibly early, still unknown, but from what I've been listening to, extremely unlikely to be Ukrainian SF from below, which would have targeted the pillars. Russian media have switched from an initial claim of a train fire that caused no damage to blaming some sort of truck bomb, which could be possible, but would be unlikely to cause damage to multiple deck sections of the bridge AND the railway section of the bridge. Their official story at the moment is basically saying that Russian security checkpoints have been utterly incompetent and let Russia's biggest logistics link be destroyed. Some sort of missile attack seems the most plausible at the moment, but there doesn't seem to be any one explanation that fits all the evidence available at the moment. Some footage apparently starting to emerge now as well. Whatever it was, it was a hefty explosion.

Blimey. Kerch bridge hit and entire sections collapsed/damaged, both the rail and road sides. That'll be Russian logistics to the southern front severely hit, as well as isolating Crimea.

Eh? How often do women’s friendly matches get 75k+ attendances!?

That's a hell of a win ahead of the World Cup! Wiegman's unbeaten record as England manager continues with a win against the current World Champions. Both teams missing a couple of their best players, not to mention a couple of VAR calls just going our way, but we'll go on with the belief we can beat absolutely anyone. Could have gone either way but these must be the best two teams in the world at the moment. Our calmness at playing out through the press was particularly impressive, and our pace on the break constantly caused them problems.

Yeah, Ukraine have been busy in Kherson Oblast, to say the least. It’s starting to filter through even to State TV as well, how badly it’s going for Russia, albeit with the ‘spin’ that it’s all of NATO combined that Russia are losing to.

“Sorry Ukraine, I know you’ve spent months gutting Russia’s forces to the point that they’re running for their lives, and have taken advantage of that to liberate territory three times the size of Belgium in the space of a few days, but you have to stop now because you’ve taken too long. If you were going to stop them you would have by now.”

I take it you haven’t been paying attention to what’s happened the past couple of weeks then?

Believe the Starlink capacity Ukraine are using was bought by the US government for one of the military aid packages to Ukraine. In any case it’s available to Ukraine and is not available to Russia.

A poll on Twitter is the result of him thinking of something and having instant access to a way to broadcast it. It was ill thought out, and won’t go down well, but on the other hand Starlink has been a massive asset for Ukraine.

So, if Russia have destroyed so many HIMARS, where’s the verified evidence that Russia would no doubt be parading all over State TV to show that they’re nothing to be afraid of? What’s the capability of Ukraine’s, that’s apparently not HIMARS, that’s allowing them still to continually hit numerous targets that require HIMARS accuracy and range to hit every day?

Congratulations, you grasped enough straws to make an entire straw-man argument.

Some of them being sent to the front with no training, under-equipped, and sanitary products in lieu of bandages. Meanwhile Ukraine’s recruitment looks slightly different.

New $1.1B aid package from the USA, including 18 HIMARS and 12 Titan anti-drone AA/EW systems. That’s going to be a significant improvement in capability for Ukraine, the Titan system in particular is unbelievably cutting edge defence tech. I’m guessing the timing of the announcement is to coincide with the sham referendums.

There aren’t any ‘winners’ in a war. Russia could stop fighting today, cut their losses more or less instantly, stop throwing people away for nothing. Russia wouldn’t be invaded, they’d be safe, and sanctions would be eased on them. Ukraine could stop fighting today. They’d be leaving hundreds of thousands of people under the occupation of people that have been murdering, raping, and torturing Ukrainian men, women, and children. Whatever the conditions of surrender would be, Russia would likely try to take more territory in the future, and no one would even begin to feel safe under those conditions. In terms of energy, the EU is already weaning itself off of Russia. For this winter, Germany already has full stores of gas, well ahead of schedule. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/germany-reaches-october-gas-storage-target-despite-extended-nord-stream-1-halt-2022-09-03/ Going forward LNG terminals are being built to replace much of the Russian energy shortfall. https://www.ft.com/content/27db90f5-a62e-4cbc-bfde-10b30d5e15c6 This is as well as the huge number of ongoing projects that were already starting to decarbonise energy production, and had already started to reduce reliance on Russian gas. That’s likely to be accelerated now. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Energy_statistics_-_an_overview Meanwhile, Russia has lost one of its biggest sources of income, and also one of its biggest sources of soft power in the EU. https://www.russiamatters.org/blog/numbers-where-do-russias-energy-exports-go Russia simply doesn’t have the infrastructure in place to transport most of that EU supply anywhere else, and are unlikely to anytime soon, especially with the sanctions they’re working under. They’ve also lost the perception that they had of being a reliable energy supplier. They won’t be getting those sales or that reputation back.

I already read the transcript. I’m not quite sure how you think it even begins to refute any of the problems with the referendum, and that’s if we accept that it’s in any way genuine, which of course it isn’t to begin with.

Regardless of what you think (or falsely claim) the result of a free and fair referendum would be, this is a referendum held during a war, with less than a week for people to make their case for either side, with voters voting at gunpoint, and hundreds of thousands of people who would be eligible to vote unable to, and the actual votes not actually making any difference to what Russia will claim the result is. Using it as any sort of argument in Russia’s favour is ridiculous, it won’t be accepted anywhere else in the world. You’re just making yourself look even sillier now.

At this point I’m genuinely curious whether manji has seen that and been daft enough to believe it’s true without taking the 30 seconds it takes to debunk it, or has posted it knowing it’s false but is daft enough to think we’d believe it without taking the 30 seconds it takes to debunk it.

Now look at the map of countries that support it.

That’ll cause upheaval because they’re still dealing with the results of joining the Dutch at the moment.