Russia - threadbanned users in OP

(what i assume are) air raid sirens being sounded in Kyiv in the last few mins

I agree entirely. It would respond and it must.

And for NATO not to respond would result in the US handing over its current position of being the only superpower to an as yet unformed European Alliance. If the US NATO abandons an Eastern European NATO member, European NATO will go it alone.

The US do NOT want a rival military alliance on the planet which they do not control even if it were a friendly one.

But they can’t do anything!

If NATO get involved to protect Ukraine the end game is nuclear war.

This I one of these myths. RT is working fine.

It's been reported as intermittent elsewhere.

Most OSINT sites are now down. Live UA Map is down and so is OSINT Ukraine twitter feeds. Either a Cyber attack or Twitter is getting bullied.

Jesus wept

It's an interesting one , my internet is intermittent so I only managed to get on to see the two helicopters moving off from the border before my internet crashed again

If it came to that, then the US would honour their NATO obligations with conventional warfare same as Russians, and no nukes would be fired until someone blinks.

Firing even one nuclear weapon against a nuclear power means you both lose massively, at least in conventional warfare theres the possibility of a stalemate of sorts. If somehow NATO - Russia ended up at war (incredibly unlikely), it would probably be limited in scope because the moment someone uses nuclear weapons it is game over for both. To be honest its not even worth discussing because its not going to happen here.

There have been multiple multi-volume academic treatises written about Russian & soviet history. I can barely scratch the surface, but what it boils down to is that the Russian empire was a conglomerate out of duchies, principalities, provinces, feudal allegiances and similar structures. These were held together basically by brute force and a Russian-born nobility that in most cases repressed any local non-Russian identities with eye-watering violence.

When the 1917 revolutions kicked off, many of these territories decided to go their own way, including Ukraine, the Baltic States, numerous territories in the Caucasus and Central Asia and Poland. This was not structured in any way and mixed in with the Russian Civil war, a bloody affair that makes the 1990s Balkan wars seem like a gentlemanly duel. As the Bolsheviks began to consolidate their forces and started moving agains the "monarchist" White Russian Forces that were often supported by western military forces, these newly independent states were brought "back into the fold", with brute force and eye-watering violence, before being reformed as soviet republics within the USSR. One of the consequences of this was years of brutal repression & famine in Ukraine during the 1920 and nowadays, this "Holodomor" is widely considered a genocide against Ukrainians.

Only a few countries managed to keep their independence in the interwar years, including Finland, the Baltic States and Poland and many of those had to fight for their independence, with the Polish Soviet War of the early 1920s in particular being almost on the scale of the battles on the Eastern Front during the Great War. The next great redrawing of the borders came during World War 2. The Molotov Ribbentrop pact saw Poland and the Baltic States carved up between the USSR and Nazi Germany, while Ukraine suffered terribly during the war, being one of the main battlegrounds during the German attack on the USSR. Some of the largest battles on the Eastern Front took place on Ukrainian soil. A lot of Ukrainians also saw the war as a good opportunity to rise up against the soviets, which resulted in mass deportations after the war. Entire ethnicities were uprooted and sent to Siberia.

After the war, and the death of Stalin, things got easier. Local languages were tolerated to a certain degree, as were local history and customs, in a radical departure from several hundred years of precedent, though that ended when Brezhnev took power. It was also during this time when Krushchev ordered the reallocation of Crimea to Ukraine. It had been considered part of another Soviet republic previously if I remember correctly. When the USSR finally crumbled in 91, many of these independent-then-annexed soviet republics decided to go independent once and for all, which leads us to the current situation.

Now, this overview is extremely brief and high level, I highly recommend both reading and catching up on this. The YouTube channels THe Great War, TimeGhost History and The Cold War have multiple 20-45 minute videos on this whole range of topics, while Drachinifel, an EXCELLENT naval history channel, has a very in-depth video on the Naval campaigns in the Baltic during the Russian Civil war. Even they aren't able to go into too much detail as the whole topic is extremely layered and complex!

Good and plenty of it I hope.