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Vlad’s mad – what can we do?

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Anybody care to speculate what happens next? So far from him we’ve seen copious amounts of lying, shouty piss-contesting (so far at least he’s kept his shirt on) and most recently a complete denial and rewriting of the history of Ukraine. On the part of the west we’ve had plenty of disingenuous statements (a.k.a. lying) about how much damage sanctions will cause, seen a wilful avoidance of any effort to see things from the other side, and been subjected to a lot of posturing and spoken defiance.

It’s hard to see any happy path though this cluster of idiocy.

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Comments

  1. I hope he enjoys his 3-4 weeks of triumph before the body bags start arriving in Moscow. The Russian army hasn’t faced any enemy better armed than a few old women in villages since the 80s –
    apparently he has such fond memories of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that he wants to repeat the experience – after all, that ended so well for all concerned.

  4. Jedward has tweeted: “Privet Russia! Your country is big enough you don’t need to takeover anymore!”. I don’t know what privet has to do with all this hoo-ha, but it wouldn’t surprise me one little bit to learn that Jedward are in the know and there’s some sort of gardening issue/hedge dispute behind all this.

  5. I’ve got absolutely no idea what’s going on. Cuba Crisis and we were all terrified. Today – “Have you seen the almond blossom, it’s like Spring?”
    Jed and/or Ward has promised to ring later but given their past record (which was crap) I’m not overly optimistic of anything like an explanation.

      • I am. He seems to be playing a serious game. If he backs down, is he going to lose face? Or could he be quite cute and say “See, I told you they were just exercises. Warmongering west spreading lies and disinformation.”

        I guess his official recognition of the two breakaway regions has upped the ante a bit though.

        Does anyone have any knowledge or information on the size or capabilities of Ukrainians armed forces…not much seems to have been said about that. Will they be capable of giving the Russians a bloody nose as Moose alludes to?

    • It’s really quite simple. Mad Vlad has invaded Jedwardistan in order to safeguard the population from further album releases, and Boris Churchill has responded by invoking sanctions against 3 blokes who have been doing their laundry in the City.

      • I was trying to say above that despite reading endless articles I still have no real idea what Putin’s up to. And also adding that unlike Cuba when it really felt we were close to nuclear war, today feels more like “We’ll bloody well make sure the Football Final doesn’t take place in St Petersburg – that’ll teach ’em”.
        I may be Wrong about all this, I usually am

        • Putin is as cunning as a fox but he isn’t stupid, and the thought of one civilised European country invading another in the 21st century is almost unthinkable. It’s a dark and dangerous game he is playing though, but as Steve T says downthread, we in the West largely have ourselves to blame, and none of our so-called leaders seem to have had the wit to realise that.

  6. Seen as Russia provides most of the world with its oil and gas, I assume there’s not much that can be done.
    Russian money is everywhere in London, and it would surprise nobody if some of that had found its way into our government, one way or another. Oligarchs sanctioned today, but it is something that should have been done years ago.
    Rosneft share price down only 5%, which tells us that the West will ultimately have to sit and watch this one play out…

  7. Don’t know how well equipped their countrymen are,
    but all of the Ukrainians I’ve ever met have had a visceral
    hatred of Russia.

    They are unlikely to go gentle into Vlad’s dark night.

  8. Basically we only have ourselves to blame and we have been outflanked by Putin so I am not sure how that constitutes him being a madman. We should never have courted Ukraine in 2014 – if anything constitutes poking the bear that was it. Their economy was a basket case and the country one of the most corrupt anywhere in Europe. The EU showed an alarming amount of idiotic ideology and they should be ashamed of the situation they created.
    Complete wankers the lot of them – they knew what Putin was like just from Chechnya and Georgia. Brain dead morons.

    • Mad (adj): enraged; greatly provoked or irritated; angry.

      Alliteration (noun): the commencement of two or more stressed syllables of a word group either with the same consonant sound or sound group, as in ‘Vlad’s mad’.

    • This is what I meant by ‘see things from the other side’. Huge amount of lazy piss-taking anti-diplomacy from the west, almost guaranteed to result in something not entirely dissimilar to what we are now seeing.

  9. Maybe this will stop governments and their indirect agencies stop grubbing for money. Complicity with Russia, China, and the Middle East and their wealth is the source of many of our problems, and neither party looks good on this.

    However, seeing how venal the cnuts are, maybe not.

  12. This is an excellent thread from a Finnish lefty – the Finns know a thing or two about Russian aggression.

  13. You probably know this already, but it was new to me: it was called “The Ukraine” because “Ukraine” is an old word for “borderland”, and Ukrainians objected to being thought of as “the borderland” of Russia. So now they’re just “borderland”, which is much better. Apparently.

  14. Part of me is in awe of him. He’s infiltrated so many Western countries and twisted the politics through indirect interference. Look at the current state of the GOP and some of the British right wing fringes.

    The other part of me is preparing a will. We live in a reputed first strike zone; will he go nuclear? probably not, but it does concentrate the mind somewhat,

  15. The PM is sounding all cross and Churchillian but I bet he’ll have pre-positioned this by telling his billionaire mates not to take it personally. I can imagine him saying “When one is Primeminister, one has to pacify the oiks!”

    • Johnson has deliberately kept the rhetoric hostile and very public, because it’s a good distraction from the woeful state they’ve put this country into.
      Putin is not crazy enough to start a nuclear conflict and neither are NATO or the EU.
      The expansion of the EU is what Putin is really trying to combat. They have been reckless in courting Ukraine, which although less corrupt than it was is far too unstable to be even considered for membership.
      A good point is made by Mr. Korhonen in that Russia’s links to the far right and toxic nationalismare useful to them in keeping up reliance on Russia’s exports of oil and gas, without which their economy would evaporate completely.
      Sanctions should therefore be targeted on the UK assets of the owners of Russia’s oil and gas businesses.

  16. Putin’s shameless and globally destabilizing land-grab in the Ukraine is worryingly just the beginning.

    Given their obsession with taking Taiwan back “into the Motherland”, President Xi and his Chinazi mates in Beijing will be studying the West’s response with great interest.

    I doubt they are going to lose any sleep over the possibility of a few economic sanctions.

  17. Excellent analysis of what’s going on by Edward Lucas in today’s Times,
    .
    Can’t post the whole thing her but will be happy to cut, paste and PM
    to anyone who’s interested.

    • Funny, these are the people who for the whole of the 60s -70s – 80s told anybody who disagreed with absolutely any aspect of Conservative policy to “get back to bloody Russia”. Now we literally have Russians in the UK actively subverting our politics and system of government… at the invitation of the Conservative party. Get back to bloody Kensington.

      • But that was a different Russia, wasn’t it? One that supposedly had anti-democratic capitalist principles. Now they’ve gone all in on the second of those, the tissue-thin veil of the first (supposedly upholding the American Dream and the mother(fucker) of all Parliaments) can be ripped asunder by everybody – treble vodkas all round!

  19. Has this country appointed a Minister for Kicking Roman Abramovich (born 1966) Repeatedly in the Bollocks yet?
    If not, why not?

    And yes, I am perfectly prepared to take on the task if asked.

  20. Thought he’d been effectively barred from the UK after the Salisbury poisoning and gone off to live in Israel or something.

    Hope you’re a bit more on the ball when it comes to kicking RA in the balls than his club’s star striker who earned the record for fewest ever touches in an EPL match over the weekend.

      • I think Chelsea should be rightly congratulated for their one League Championship victory (1954-55) with the hope, for them, that they may compete and win a second in the future.

        For, in 2022, they sit on “one.”
        Who knows, were they to win a second, they may be the first London team to win the European Cup.

        Good luck chaps.

        • Check the names on the trophy.
          While you’re at it, let’s have the exact tally for legitimate titles due to Real Madrid. Really think Franco’s pet PR project actually merit all those trophies from the mid 50’s onwards? That competition was bent from its inception.
          Football is a murky business & always has been since the Corinthian spirit took a backseat.
          David Dein & his pals set up the Premier League with a view to coining it & keeping all the cake for themselves. Then these gauche foreigners turned up with wads of dodgy cash & their cosy set up got disrupted.
          I love the fact that Chelsea are the only club in London. All of the others would swap in a heartbeat, & there is is no moral high ground whatsoever.
          Chelsea have just played the game better than the others. The powers that be have left it an awfully long time to now be clutching their pearls & in fact, they don’t give a toss even now. If they did & due diligence of ‘fit to own’ was real, then Man City & Newcastle Utd’s owners would have been sent packing. But they weren’t.
          If there is a clean out of ALL dodgy money in football, great! – we can all start again from a pure, level playing field. Until that happens, if you don’t like it, walk away by all means. If not, get reconciled to the way things are & enjoy the actual games.

      • That definitely won’t happen until a refund has been worked out for the money wasted on Lukaku- who as observers have now seen twice at the same club has the mobility of a houseboat.

  21. Well, here we go then. What happens next is anybody’s guess. Russia and China v Ukraine and the Rest of the World. And what a mess some of the major players in the Ukraine team are in. We’ve never had a worse PM, America has just been through turmoil, with even worse on the horizon. Putin’s chosen his moment wisely. Let’s just hope this doesn’t escalate into something far, far worse. The world has never been such a scary place in my lifetime.

  26. I suppose we can expect a load of sabotage-hacking if they were to introduce sanctions on Putin & co that actually bite. I think they should do it anyway, but I suspect our Govt., the EU and the USA will bottle it.
    As someone pointed out, our continued reliance on fossil fuels keeps Russia just about viable, economically. If we could turn off the oil and gas pipelines, Putin would drop into the shit very quickly.

    • European trade delegation with open cheque book to the People’s Republic, sealing a mahoosive 30 year order for Chinese solar panels, on the understanding that Xi mobilises his armed forces to hammer the crap out of Putin’s military first in exchange for the unopposed – by the west – subsequent Chinese occupation of Kazakhstan. Reduce our dependency upon Russian oil and gas and then let the two megalomaniacs fight themselves to a standstill in central Asia. I should run for parliament.

  28. (Long sentence advisory) I just watched a worrying German TV news panel discussion where it was admitted the gradual reduction of budget and personpower allotted to the German military (since the end of the Cold War) has left the country materially unable to defend itself against invasion. This is the German Army. Underpersonned, underfunded, underequipped.

    One of the panel said that the German political way was liberal democracy, but are they prepared to fight for it?

  31. I see they’ve taken the Champions League final and the Formula 1 away from Russia. You can bet the IOC will do their usual job of looking the other way, and Russia – in some form or other – will compete at the next Olympics.

  32. We’re in the ‘we are outraged’ phase from the world leaders. Plenty of standing behind podiums and looking serious. Ours – and the only one I’m aware of being interviewed under police caution – has wibbled at the Despatch Box a series of words.

    They’re all waiting to see what actually happens and cutting cloth to fit. Ukraine is toast, Putin will prevail. Whatever anyone says or does because not a military boot from a force outside dare press an imprint.

    The only reason he won’t is if a rapid and radical coup takes place. As likely as me coming third in HP Saucy’s Change One Letter game.

    • As usual the only vaguely good thing one can say about Johnson is that he’s not Corbyn who’s busy wringing his hands and looking a bit cross because its curtailing his time in his allotment.

      As far as you coming third in HP”s game, I and my wife and son seriously hope you do as we’ve bet the kids’ college fees on it

  35. The guy who has come out of this standing head and shoulders above Biden, Johnson, Macron and the ice-cold shard of evil that is Putin is the Ukrainian President and former comedian, Volodymyr Zelinsky.

    What an extraordinarily brave and inspiring figure to have leading your country during the biggest crisis in its history.

    Those supposedly in charge of the West should hang their heads in shame.

  39. They’re shelling a children’s cancer unit in Kyiv.

    Kids with cancer. Getting you hard is it, Vlad? Big man, Vlad! Go you!! Fuck those wusses Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pol Pot, you can do so much better can’t you, Mr Big Dick?

  40. Truth being the first casualty of war and all that…we are being told that the removal of the SWIFT banking access will stop Putin being able to access funds and destroy the Russian economy.

    I’d love this to be true, but wouldn’t Putin have thought of that possibility in advance?

    His funds are probably safe as houses in Switzerland, the City of London or in the Channel Islands.

    • @Black-Celebration
      @mikethep

      The SWIFT sanction isn’t about punishing Putrid and his oligarch mates whose ill-gotten gains you rightly point out are safely parked out of reach somewhere.

      The ban is about damaging the Russian economy (and by extension ordinary Russians) making it hard for The country’s businesses to get paid when they sell goods or services overseas

    • Time for the politicians and mutinationals to get their fingers out of their arses (and the fossil fuel honeypot) and seriously start the conversion to Hydro, Wind, Wave and Solar production. Stop buying energy from the Russians. Let them keep their oil and gas, for the good it will do them.

  42. One scary ramification of the SWIFT sanction is that Putrid is now free to get his armies of hackers to start disrupting the system with potentially disastrous consequences for Western economies

      • Interesting point.

        When the NATO treaty was drafted all those years ago, cyber attacks were probably something most of us only ever read about in Philip K Dick short stories.

        Anyone here know if the treaty’s wording has been updated to include such aggressions?

        • Whether included in the NATO treaty or not, the problem with Cyber attacks is proving the origin.
          If you get a serious cyber attack traceable to the USA and another traceable to Russia, how can you claim one is cyber-crime and the other is an act of war?
          The perpetrators know this and the way the Internet is structured means it is now almost impossible to completely isolate a particular area of the world from the rest of it.

          • The Chinese have done a pretty good job sealing their internet off from pesky external sources. Unless you know your stuff (which rules out most of the population of most countries) you are limited to what your ISP’s are willing to let you see.

            • Reuters quoted in the i today, reported that ‘a serious cyber attack on a Nato state could be treated like an armed attack and trigger the alliance’s collective defence clause.’

  43. Word is Roman Abramovich (born 1966) might be severing all links with Chelsea F.C., his “beloved” Chelsea F.C.
    He really really loved them. Oh yes.

    Still, his work is done here.

    I really hope Liverpool fans today and all football fans in the Premier League step up to the plate on this one. I rather got the feeling Everton and Manchester City did yesterday.

    Another piece optimistically suggests Chelsea could go bust.

    Foreign banks that no one apart from Rees-Mogg (born 1969) has heard of is obviously small beer and far, far too late… I’d go right now for Chelsea. Chuck them out of the League and tell them to play in Russia. It’s pretty much what the franchises do in Gridiron. You want to watch Chelsea?
    Fine… the next home match is in Moscow, it’s against Moscow United, and it’s on Russia Today… but all Chelsea fans should be encouraged to buy a season ticket.

    • A masterpiece of weasel wordsmithery, RA’s statement is more interesting for what it doesn’t say than what it does.

      First because RA studiously avoids making any apology or expression of regret as to what his mate Putrid has done and is still doing.

      And second because far from waiving the estimated £1.5 to £1.8 billion in cash Chelsea owes him and relinquishing any and all involvement in the club, he’s merely handing over “stewardship”.

  44. Now the appalling Alexander Lukashenko, a man every bit as unremittingly evil as Putrid himself, has pledged Belarus’s military support for the invasion.

    On the bright side, it looks as though the world will be getting shot of two grade A shitbags for the price of one when this madness fails which it surely must.

    • Ukraine is an extremely large country. There is no possibility of Russia/Belarus holding it under occupation for any length of time without the consent of the majority of Ukrainians. Casualties of a long-term occupation will be high for Russia/Belarus as well as for Ukraine.

  45. Russia’s nuclear forces are now at combat readiness on account of the West’s ‘aggression’. Before anyone assumes Putin will never be crazy enough to use them, how many of us thought he would ever annex Crimea or invade Ukraine in the first place?

  49. Predictably craven response from FIFA (“reflag” the team in the same way the IOC did their winter and summer athletes after years of drug cheating) in rhe face of numerous European countries’ call for an outright ban.

    On the brighter side, today’s Times has a typically trenchant piece from the always insightful Edward Lucas on just how catastrophically this has backfired for Putrid.

    PM me if you’d like me to cut and paste you a copy rather than opt for the paper’s free 7-day trial.

  50. Biden has warned Putin he has “no idea what’s coming”

    Given that the world has hardly heard a peep out of him in the seven days
    since the Russians began subjugating a peaceful neighbour, neither it seems
    does Biden himself.

    First his craven capitulation to the Taliban’s retaking of Afghanistan, and now
    his invisible man act in the face of Putrid’s naked act of war.

    Xi must be quaking in his boots as he contemplates how the US will
    respond when he starts accelerating his plans to Ukrainize Taiwan.

  51. Word is Abramovich wants to visit Stamford Bridge (sorry, “the bridge”) one more time.
    He LURVES that club.

    I want that as well… he’ll be sure to tell us all first, of course… strange timing him suddenly bailing out… I didn’t see that coming.

    Reckon priti patel’s plod will be up to the task of arresting him?
    No, me neither.

    Can’t be difficult, he’s the ugly f******… the one sitting next to Fat Boy J.

    • Even the usually dependable Colin Murray has just interviewed Pat Nevin in a very short, lily-livered, not addressing the issue, way.
      Strewth, it was more lily-livered than either’s record collection.
      Believe me, it was THAT lame.

      All about what it means to Chelsea in the future, yadda, yadda.
      I don’t f****** care.

      The question should be: “YOU, Nevin, are part of the f****** problem. YOU knew where this money came from. Discuss.”

      See also: a similar self-serving interview with Sebastian Coe earlier today.
      “YOU, Coe, are part of the f****** problem. YOU knew where this money came from. Discuss.”

      Same question for all of them. Any other angle is totally irrelevant.
      “YOU bought into this. Discuss.”

  52. This is by far the most plausible posting I’ve found online thus far that offers some insight into the strategic mindset behind the awful stuff we are seeing unfold.
    It’s mostly apolitical & from what I can see makes a lot of sense. It outlines the brutal consequences of ‘Realpolitik’ in its most unvarnished form.
    A couple of caveats – it’s almost half an hour long & I found his voice pretty irritating. The end section is basically a plug for his other stuff, but I believe the ‘meat in the sandwich’ is helpful.

    • That’s a really excellent video, JJ. Thanks for sharing. Clear and massively informative (to me anyway) as to the history that lurks behind Vlad’s psychotic mind.

  53. Anyone seen Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes over on Sky?

    The parallels between what went on then and what is happening now are positively chilling

    1) The Russians fuck up big time and lie through their teeth to cover it up.

    2) When no one buys the cover up, they blame it on lies from the western media.

    3) Poor kids from the arse end of nowhere who are in the army are dragooned into doing things whose ramifications they cannot begin to understand.

    Aside from the piteous howling of the dogs left to die as their owners are evacuated in buses, the most heart-wrehching scene in C:TLT shows the camera panning across the nervously smiling faces of a few of the 4,000 young soldiers who were sent up onto the roof to clear away the radioactive graphite.

    Within a couple of years the owners of four of every five of the faces you see will be dead as a result of radiation poisoning.

  57. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60814306
    Good to see Boris Grebenshchikov speaking out about the attack on Ukraine. I first knew of him and his group ‘Aquarium’ when they opened for David Byrne in Moscow, 1994. I picked up most of their ’90s albums while living there and pretty good they are too – folky, well produced. I met him briefly when he played a solo acoustic set at The John Bull pub (handy for me as I lived on the fifth floor of that building) Some of you may be interested in his solo album ‘Lilith’, some of which was recorded with members of The Band (Rick Danko and Garth Hudson for sure, maybe others) – not one of my favourites, but maybe of interest to Band watchers. I don’t know what his current status is as an elder statesman of Russian music, but it’s no harm to have a high profile performer speaking out.

  59. Anyone see Joe Biden’s cringeworthy speech?

    Don’t his advisers bother to vet what he is supposed to say before he opens his mouth and slides his foot inside?

    Still, roll on 2024 and a choice of Biden/Trump or, rather more unlikely (though equally depressing), Harris/Trump.

    The Chinese must be laughing their socks off as they continue their shameless land grabs across the South China Sea and finesse their plans to take back Taiwan

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