Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Someone not getting to play a tennis match /drive a very fast car vs people being slaughtered in their home…..I have very little sympathy for these sports people

There was an excellent documentary about tv rain (Dozhd) on bbc4 last night on their fight to remain an independent news source, tango with Putin

It's mostly Indians and Muslims. Strange bedfellows there. Muslims aren't too enamoured with the USA, so there's a knee jerk reaction to support Russia. Sad that the victims (Ukrainians) are cast aside in foreign policy arguments. There's no nuance these days. It is possible to look at each individual conflict on its own merit. No one can look at this war objectively and say Ukraine deserved it.

Russia cannot afford to cut off the gas. At present they have no other market for it. It cannot be stored and the taps out of the gas reserves cannot be turned off.

By actually not taking Russian oil exports the West is making it even harder for Russia to turn off the gas pipeline ( even if it ever would consider it) as it's it will not I come stream now.

If that happens, it's a humanitarian crisis and NATO has intervened on that basis before. Although still unlikely to do so this time, because of Russia being a nuclear power.

Humour helps me, feel free to skip past my post if you think I'm being irreverent.

The Strela would be excellent against attack helicopters. As we move more and more to trying to take cities, the Russian forces on the ground will need tanks and attack helicopters to back up ground forces. That why javelins and Strela will come into play.

Very hard to hit military jets at high altitude. Russia has not got the technology that the US has on using guided missiles from military planes.

While it may seem silly these are functional weapons if used in the right way

NATO cannot directly intervene but the if the UN gets it's **** together, surely it can send in a peace enforcing coalition of troops. In order to prevent genocide. Of course the Russian veto must be overcome but that is not beyond the collective will of other states. And since we are privileged (cursed?) to be on the security council, maybe more responsibility lies on us than others..

To be fair, the office Russian President account on Twitter isn't really used for opinions or statements. Seems to be little more than a feed of press releases. Trump's accounts were being used for spreading obvious disinformation and inciting hatred.

It would probably be a different story if Putin's Twitter account was being used to make direct statements about what was happening in Ukraine.

The main reason Twitter waited until after the inauguration to delete Trump's account was legal ambiguity. There were questions about whether it could end up in legal hot water by deleting the data of the current sitting president; i.e. who does that data belong to, Twitter, the individual, or the US public? There are fairly strict laws about data retention and such when it comes to US presidents. This is what the buttery males lost their minds over, and why there have been so many legal battles about getting access to records from Trump's time in office.

Yeah, gluten content is too low. Hence why we get it from Canada.

Germany to increase weapons deliveries to Ukraine including 2700 Russian made shoulder fired anti aircraft missiles ,oh the irony .

They wouldn't allow their weapons to be sold to ukraine and now they are sending Russian weapons to Ukraine

NATO has intervened before without the endorsement of the UN security council, so this isn't a policy/precedent issue.

It's a practicality issue. This time they would be killing Russians, albeit on foreign soil, but Russians nevertheless and there are escalation risks in doing that.

That's interesting, I never realised that. What do they do then with their surplus gas, vent it?