Russia - threadbanned users in OP

This has gone too far

Enough flexing around, yes Putin is in a corner,

All i see is the west wiping the floor with him.

Give the guy an exit, get him out of Ukraine, drop peacekeepers all over the eastern border.

give him Crimea and let's get this over with.

That’s is poor alright. And obscene when you consider the wealth of the oligarchs. It’s obvious something has gone horribly wrong in this society, well before the fall of communism too. The Soviet communist “model” was very much in the mold of Orwell’s The Farm. That only continued but the top cronies became oligarchs and could enjoy the trappings of the west.

Hear hear!

There faces should be put up on every lamp post for there acts of aggression towards women and children. Its not hard to watch. Whats hard to watch is seeing two young children been shot in Ukraine this morning.

TLDR: The Russian gas giant Gazprom, is using the greens to make Russia great again.

We get most of our gas from the Corrib field and from a pipeline to the Uk. Most of the gas in the pipeline comes from Norway to the UK, but a small percentage would be Russian gas from yet another pipeline from the UK to the continent.

An american company wants to build a Liquified Natural Gas terminal on the Shannon estuary. LNG is an alternative to pipelines The Gas is liquified and kept at very low temperatures. It requires specialised terminals to offload and store the cargo given it has to be kept very cold, insulated and liquid. The LNG can then be fed into the domestic gas network after warming it back to gas. Most importantly, LNG can be transported by sea and doesn't tie you to the person at the other end of a pipe.

If you own the LNG terminal, it means you can in theory buy gas from a multitude of sources, even as far as Australia where LNG is a big export. This gives you energy security because you are not restricted to a single supplier and can shop around. The US company proposing the Shannon terminal would likely want to get all the LNG from the US, but the government could easily impose contractual obligations allowing it full control in an emergency or other special circumstances.

The Green party - Moron Ryan, in particular, oppose this and not satisfied with just banning this project, want to pass legislation banning LNG terminals from being built in Ireland in total. This is insane and extremely suspicious, because it looks like the Russian gas giant Gazprom, has been infiltrating and bribing the green movement as a whole, spurring them to objecting to US fracked gas and taking an anti-nuclear stance, which has lead the Greens in Germany to successfully push to have perfectly good zero CO2 nuclear power stations shut down - all of them.

The basic idea is to get Europe off Nuclear and LNG - which lets Europe buy gas from NotRussia - and make it ever more reliant on Russian gas, making Europe even more susceptible to Russian influence and less able to respond to Russia when it wants to invade and take over places.

The whole NATO threat nonsense is just another side of Putin's effort to reduce and eliminate impediments to his empire building schemes, and it looks like he is also weaponising food and fertiliser supplies as well - both of which Ukraine was a major world producer of - to further make it impossible for countries to oppose his aggression. By grabbing Ukraine he kills 3 birds with one stone - gets control of Ukraine, 8% of world wheat exports and a good chunk of fertiliser manufacture, adding significantly to his portfolio of levers and threats.

So Putin wants to make as many countries as possible, extremely dependent on Russian energy, food and fertiliser - India gets almost all it's fertiliser from Russia, which stops it's people from starving and is why they abstained from the UN condemnation vote - so he has leverage and thus freedom to do as he pleases.

If your landlord can turn off your heating, electricity and stop you growing or buying food, you are unlikely to complain about what he's doing to the kids next door.

Nothing big here. They are collecting expelled diplomats.

Seriously lads you'll have to try a lot harder. I know some have to big up Putin but there's a limit to incredulity.

The attack on the Nuclear Power Station was verified by the UN's nuclear watchdog. Maybe you should try doing a little bit of research before trying that type of crap.

One of their guys got kicked out of the UN the other day for espionage. I would imagine they are collecting people.

They won't even win it like the U.S. won those conventional military invasions vs the armed forces of those countries in 2001 and 2003, respectively because Russia is already sustaining much worse losses than what the U.S. sustained in similar periods. Not to mention their progress through Ukraine has been quite slow so far, they're being hit with massive sanctions and their foe has the backing of the western world. Russia may win the war, but it's going to be seriously arduous, bloody and brutal, to see through even the military campaign proper in their apparent objective of taking Ukraine as a whole.

Russia have "seized" a psychiatric hospital with 670 patients in a town near Kiev apparently. I mean ffs like.

It goes back to before Communism to the time of the Tzars. It was that type of inequality that led to the revolution. But Stalinism quickly turned things back pretty much to Tzarist ways and after the 90's, we have the situation we see now with, again, a wealth inequality that's absolutely staggering.

It breeds a lot of resentment, but ingrained in the Russian psyche is a natural endurance. As a people they have always been poorly led, but they also resign themselves to that as well. They naively believed, as a lot in the west did too, that they were going to get a democracy when their "Communism" fell apart. But all they got was another power grab and we are where we are today. But it happens continuously because the Russian people have learned over hundreds of years to put up with things.

There are places outside of the likes of Moscow and St. Petersburg that haven't changed in a century. Little towns and villages that, approximately, look and feel the same since pre-revolutionary times. There are places in eastern Russia that spend all summer preparing to be cut off in the winter and that's the way they've done it forever. There were efforts made since the 70's to move entire Oblasts to more urban areas or to at least try to modernise them. You can see strange images of rural towns with these massive city blocks standing in the middle looking really out of place. But they're hundreds of miles from anywhere. There are still millions of Russians who live in extreme rural circumstances, and I'm not talking about something like Hackballscross. I mean really cut off.

I've no doubt that people like that don't even know that there's even a war going on in the Ukraine.

Well they fired at a nuclear plant but did not hit the nuclear part of it and caused a fire in an ancillary building. This in turn led to footage and speculation about what had happened. Most people would agree that firing at or near a nuclear power in any form is not a good idea so not sure what else what it is you think people will learn from this post.

That's the tourism trade fecked then. Big hit to the Irish economy.