badgerx16

What sort of PM needs to be told whether he is at a party?

BoJo and Sunak given FPNs after Partygate.

Not every country holds the Western World view. China especially, but also India and some African nations, are playing their own game. It is likely that at least half of the global population tune in to media outlets that don't follow the UK/US/EU narrative over Ukraine.

Biden will not get involved militarily unless a NATO member is attacked.

No red cards or VAR controversy about today.

Right I'm off. Time to look forward to the Grand National.

But nobody gets a backlash from us after a bad defeat.

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.