Ukraine Invasion: Part 24

[MagicFox]

Welcome one and all and thanks again to everyone contributing

@Igotjelly i really want to know what it said!!

I do also think it’s worth reading up on the EU’s mutual defence pact. What the UK has signed really isn’t a huge step further than that.

Reading a bit into it I suspect something along the lines of prisoner exchanges like we’ve seen before. As ever though it’s proof that diplomacy is not dead.

@Igotjelly i agree re mutual defence pact, it’s really just reinstalling what brexit took away I suppose.

Ah okay - yes at least it’s not completely dead.

With all due respect that's not true.

The U.K. does not share a border with Russia.

Having a basement is no protection (as people in Ukraine have discovered) to soldiers marching through the place where you live. Neither is it going to weather a large bomb dropped on it - even if you survive you might still die die trapped underground.

I appreciate that people are frightened. It's a perfectly natural emotional response.

However, the rational response is to look at where appeasing Putin has got us. It didn't work. 2014 demonstrated that Russia can take parts of Ukraine without censure.

The thought they took from that was minimal resistance to swallowing the whole.

So what next if we back off now? Leave nations bordering Russia to deal with Putin in isolation?

It is scary because this is a pivotal moment in history and it's one where we need to make hard choices that come from the head and not the heart.

There is a difference culturally. Swedes are like the ultimate boy scouts, be prepared. So it's not out of the blue for us. The instructions for being prepared for war or disaster used to be the first thing in the phone book. Then they issued a booklet to every home with the same info around 10 years as people didn't have phone books anymore. So being told to be prepared is normal here, they've just upped the gears lately.

😂

I guess in reality the risk has increased. That’s not to say it’s likely but for a country that prides itself in preparedness it makes sense that with an increased risk (no matter how minimal) the response also increases.

I vividly remember being given the disaster booklet when I visited Tokyo. It’s largely about surviving a natural disaster but covers war etc. the Japanese also have a national holiday whereby they sort their stockpiles. So really the UK are the odd ones out.

On a lighter note, my highly strung mate made me laugh the other day. You cannot get water carriers here for love nor money as everyone is now taking steps to prepare. So DH bought some plastic storage boxes with lids as an alternative. My mate, who has bagsied a spot in our basement as she doesn't have one, starting kicking off about whether the plastic was BPA free. I was like 'Brenda, if you're stuck in a 2x2m homemade fallout shelter for 2 weeks with 4 other people, eating cold baked beans and pissing in a bucket the last thing you're going to be worrying about is whether your water has feckin BPAs in it'.

This is is! It even has a wee mascot!

Cultural difference too, in the idea of protecting every citizen rather than just the most important because of the culture of equality and no one being better than anyone else. And the best way to protect is to prepare. And also Finland and Sweden both have the total defence doctrine which makes every citizen part of the national defence rather than just the military so preparing everyone is very important. Voluntary defence courses have shot up in popularity here, courses are sold out very quickly, we want to be prepared.

Just order from Finland, we've got loads of water carriers, it's emergency radios that are hard to get hold of here.

Ok my MN App on IOS is now cutting off every last few words everyone is posting

We had had a windup radio already because we're seasoned campers. We only needed extra water capacity because 'Brenda' bagsied a spot and her emergency planning will consist of buying 50 jars of nutella and a spoon.

ISW

As previously assessed, ISW believes Russian battalion tactical groups (BTGs) fighting in Ukraine have been so heavily degraded that counting them is no longer a useful metric of Russian combat power.
@YahooNews: t.co/1niR2agfL3

twitter.com/TheStudyofWar/status/1524437300574310401?t=J64w-T9I3uxHjkHhZhlG6w&s=19

I don't agree, the UK's status as a nuclear power and our membership of NATO makes us significantly safer than many other countries, which means that it's right that we step in to protect other countries without the same deterrent. This is a scary situation but we're in a very privileged position in the UK in that respect.

I haven't been keeping as up to date with things as usual (bloody Covid) so I'll have to read up more on this security arrangement. But my instinct is that, quite apart from it being the right thing to do, providing security assurances to Finland and Sweden is significantly safer for everybody than not doing so because it decreases the risk of the conflict spreading further.

And it makes sense for it to be us, because the US doing so would be incendiary and we have the clout (and nuclear weapons) to act as a really strong deterrent. I'm no fan of Boris et al, but I do think that the UK has shown that it really won't back down to threats, so the deterrent is also plausible. I would have thought (but can't be sure without checking) that the UK will have consulted with its NATO allies over this and that we would still have the US in our corner and that article 5 would still apply in the unlikely event that we were seriously threatened. I'm really glad that we've entered into the agreement.

Also, not sure if this is of any comfort but I'm sure that NATO protection for Sweden/ Finland during the process of joining has been reported on (quite heavily) for a few days now and since the invasion began it has definitely been mentioned about their interests to join. Obviously Putin is aware of this and has actually warned against it before but I'm sure if he were wanting to attack either country, he would've done it before knowing the NATO protection was on the cards. Ignore me if I'm wrong but that's what I'm telling myself to keep calm and carry on

This has made me absolutely roar with laughter 😆

Agreed, I would say that it's a good sign that the deterrent of NATO intervention works (if it was ever anything more than hot air from Putin.) However, I think there will be a lot of threatening rhetoric from Russia over this on the horizon, it's Putin's MO.

Not really.

Let's hypothetically assume Russia decided to drop a single nuke on Reading to teach us a lesson. About 500,000 people are killed or maimed. The whole world breathes in and says "Hell, we must de-escalate. It could be Seattle or Turin or Lyons next." (Humans are nimby's remember.)

Putin is allowed to finish up with Ukraine so long as he calls it a day on his nuclear strikes and the war is declared over. There then follows a long, cold, icy war. Article 5, or whatever, was never executed, but billions stay alive and the world goes on. They say "Poor Reading, but you know, had we executed Article 5, Seattle, Turin and Lyons would have gone also and with them 3,000,000 souls."

The NATO protocols are not prescriptive enough. In any event, nothing ever happens until it happens. So, don't bank on it.

Thank your God the UK has nuclear weapons. Just one of the UK submarines carrying the trident deterrent could destroy most major Russian cities in a single launch. And because one of those is at sea at any one time - and I am sure this number may increase soon - this is the only deterrent against a nuclear attack on the UK. Russia knows this.

We will shortly need to replace trident. The cost will be about £200 billion. That is equal to about 90 days of HMRC tax revenue. Sell of some Russian owned Park Lane property and that bill gets cut by about a quarter.

Ukraine and Belarus gave up their nuclear weapons. Enough said.

Quite.

So the EU were ALREADY signed up to defend Sweden and Finland. The UK is not putting itself 'out there'. It is aligning with the rest of Europe.

Biden has informally signalled that the US will also make a similar agreement with Sweden / Finland. It just hasn't signed on the dotted line yet.

The UK doing it first means we don't look like the US's lapdog (lots of optics here Johnson will want to have or avoid).

I am fairly sure we will see a formalisation of this

I believe that Macron has said they would defend both if attacked too. In line with their commitments.

The whole point here is we aren't defensively weaker. We would be weaker than our EU neighbours if we didn't sign. But no one is saying that are they?

Reality is that this isn't about NATO threatening Putin. Putin is afraid of universally available Nutella. Putin is afraid of women and minorities. He is afraid of anti-corruption politicians and activists. He is afraid of freedom of speech. He is afraid of the very idea that people can determine their own future.

Russia is a dalek. We hide behind the sofa as children because they are dead scary. But they got their tops blown up pretty easily and couldn't go upstairs. And they were always defeated by the zany antics of the Doctor who ran around defending Earth.

From a purely selfish viewpoint I would rather be known as the friend of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland than Iran and Belarus.

Russia is a dalek. We hide behind the sofa as children because they are dead scary. But they got their tops blown up pretty easily and couldn't go upstairs. And they were always defeated by the zany antics of the Doctor who ran around defending Earth.

Or in this case, a lack of microchips and semiconductors.

@BringBackCoffeeCreams · 11/05/2022 19:36

We only needed extra water capacity because 'Brenda' bagsied a spot and her emergency planning will consist of buying 50 jars of nutella and a spoon.

Do you remember that report from a Ukrainian woman who overheard Russian soldiers’ reaction to the life of Ukrainians?

”They have all the houses made of bricks, laptops and Nutella in every house - it can not be"

You better tell Brenda her cache of nutella in your bunker might tempt poor Russian soldiers.