badgerx16

Brentford put 4 past them at the Bridge.

Not just AA - the whole bloody team.

On the one side there may be a video that shows one soldier being shot after capture, and the Ukrainians saying it will be properly investigated. On the other there is clear and irrefutable evidence of THOUSANDS of non-combatants being deliberately targetted and killed and those responsible denying it all. Absolutely requires a 'balanced' view.

It wasn't. It wasn't even, as Manji claims, to 'celebrate' an election. It started in late 2013 when the pro-Russian President leveraged the Ukrainian Parliament to renege on plans to approach the EU for closer economic ties. This led to mass protests through November 2013, that culminated in violence in February 2014, after which the President fled to Moscow, the Parliament was dissolved, and new elections were set for May 2014. There are claims from both sides about the shootings; most likely the majority were caused by the Police, though there were snipers shooting at and killing a few of the security personnel present.

Nazi coup ?

Is a nice collection of articles and reference materials that most signatories want enforced as long as they are not involved in the armed confrontation in question. Russia has not ratified all of the protocols.

Whilst there is no excuse for that, if proven true, Ukrainian soldiers are seeing their own friends and families targeted directly, and as the Russians withdraw from the North they are finding mass graves and hundreds of murdered non-combatants left lying in the street. Remember, many of the Ukrainian troops were civilians 6 weeks ago.

Stress

Indeed, plus Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are all still de-facto Russian territories.

From the BBC; "Russia has suffered "significant losses of troops", President Vladimir Putin's spokesman has said. Dmitry Peskov was asked on Sky News whether the war had been a "humiliation", given that Russia had retreated from the capital, lost thousands of troops and that President Volodymyr Zelensky was still in power. He said this was a "wrong understanding" of what was going on. But asked again if Russia has lost thousands of troops, he said: "Yes, we have significant losses of troops and it's a huge tragedy for us."" .............. "Russian soldiers can be heard talking about the murder of Ukrainian civilians in military radio traffic intercepted by Germany's foreign intelligence (BND), according to several separate media reports. The BND has audio material that appears to match the locations of bodies found in Bucha, the reports from German media say. In one, Russians appear to talk about interrogating people and then shooting them. In another, a soldier talks about shooting someone on a bike - which apparently matches a well-known photo showing a dead cyclist."

Do away with internal markets and keep it well away from interfering politicians.

What a load of tripe.

2 items of interest on the news today; First, Rishi Sunak's wife is a 'non-dom' for tax purposes, but nobody knows where she actually does pay tax, ( if at all ). Second, Kwasi Kwateng says that in this country 'we do not impose infrastructure on people, it requires local consent'. So that rules out any chance of reopening the fracking wells. Good.

If the stories of the Explosive Reactive Armour pads on some tanks actually effectively being empty cardboard boxes as the explosives and electronic components have been stripped out for the black market, that wouldn't help.

Ukraine has no experience with modern US armour so would need extensive training, and the engines on the M1 require specialist engineering tools and facilities. Much better to go with the Poland proposal; any NATO member with Russian tanks passes them to Ukraine and the US then backfills their units with reserve M1s. The only issue there might be where countries like Poland, Slovenia, and Bulgaria have upgraded T-72s etc. with modern western tech that NATO might not want to risk falling into Russian hands on the battlefield.

Considering there are plenty of images coming out of Ukraine showing troops with WW1 rifles and pre-WW2 machine guns, they have issues throughout their armoury. According to some reports only 1 in 10 of the thousands of tanks in long term storage have been capable of being brought up to operational status.

Maybe Trump's imposition of trade tariffs and talk of reducing US commitment to NATO, as demonstrated by his reduction in troop numbers stationed here, led European countries to think of looking for security elsewhere, including closer economic ties with Russia.

It is comparatively easy for the UK to remove Russian energy supplies from it's services. It is also easy for us, on our anti-Eu Brexit island, to criticise European countries that are far more heavily dependent on those same Russian fuels. Where is the evidence that the UK is providing assistance to countries such as Germany to help them wean themselves off the Russian gas and oil, or should we simply continue to sit back and criticise ?

The problem is that almost all EU members are also members of NATO and any more overt military assistance would be claimed as evidence of NATO aggression by Putin.

Maiden

From the videos posted on Reddit I reckon one of the most useful things we could send to Ukraine is more John Deere tractors to help with recovering abandoned Russian kit.

There should be a process whereby the full Council of the UN can convene and over rule a Security Council veto with a given majority, say 80% of member countries.

The UN can, and do, act. Just not when one of the 5 permanent members of the Security Council is involved.

The Czechs are sending T-72s and BMP-1s to Ukraine, Sweden is intending to send a number of their BMP-1 clones, and Germany is to approve the export, via a private dealer, of former East German BMPs.

TBF, they would still be stuck in Poland waiting for visas.