Russia - threadbanned users in OP

Still need a clear alternative to NATO membership as a security guarantee for Ukraine that is acceptable to both sides...

The latest threat from Putin: keep on bombing Mariupol until Ukrainian forces surrender. Macron talked with Vlad(again) this week and said that Vlad would consider a humanitarian evacuation; however Vlad seems to think otherwise; See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60926470

What scumbags. Biden is right: no peace until Vlad goes.

Don't forget he assassinated one would be political rival Boris Nemtsov and threw the world famous chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in jail when he was gaining momentum in his presidential race.

Then he first tried to poison opposition leader Alexei Navalny and when that didn't work he threw him in jail on trumped up charges.

He tried to poison a former leader of Ukraine because he wouldn't play ball.

Also it might be personal because supposedly Yushchenko used to pull the pi** out of Putin.

Russia invaded a sovereign state, and using the most brutal savagery imaginable attempted to subdue it, cold bloodily killing men women and men. Now just suppose that Ukraine had the same type and amount of weapons that the Russian's had ( if they had, then there may not have been an invasion in the first place !!! but I digress. ) you can be sure that the first Russian missile / bomb to fall on an Ukrainian city, would be answered in kind. And no one would criticize them for that. But they did not have these kind of weapons, and so the bombing is a one way street. None the less, the overall effect is that Ukraine has the moral high ground, and that's a powerful weapon in itself.

"Yosyp, father of a Ukrainian soldier Vasyl Vekliuk, 59, who died in a shelling near Popasna in the Luhansk region, attends his funeral in Stebnyk, Lviv region, Ukraine. Photograph: Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Reuters"

What war crimes committed by Russian troops from Ukraine to Syria have been prosecuted .

None .

The Geneva convention is as useful as putin pretending to tell the truth

One could argue that an over reliance on dialogue, and not actions, has gotten us into the current mess.

The current version of Russia seems to only support monologue.

The only good news is that Russia doesn't have a good military force and they are only capable of actions against hapless adversaries so the chances of yet another mess are pretty remote.

I really do think we are gone soft in the West.

No we couldn't have bombing of Russian cities as they are civilians.

After all one side needs to take the moral high ground, be damned if you get the shyet blown out of ye in the process.

It's alright though to let Russian population sleep soundly in their beds whilst the Ukrainian one is crouching in cellars or scattered to hell around Europe.

And we have to keep the leaders of states meeting and talking to a warmonger and dictator to keep dialogue open.

After all we all know how well dictators listen to the voice of reason and how often they admit they are wrong.

FFS does anyone seriously think that Putin is suddenly going to start listening to Macron.

I can just imagine him suddenly getting up from his end of the table, taking the 2 minutes to stroll down the other end to sit beside Marcon and tell him he now sees reason and will withdraw back to barracks.

And while he is at it, he will release all political prisoners, withdraw support for Assad, detail all the poisonings, all the corruption and all the drug cheating in sport.

I can see the ad.

"If Carlsberg could only talk to Vladamir."

Chechen soldier off to war https://twitter.com/InfoGeek17/status/1509202213310185482?s=20&t=k1NMh1YS5swcYPS1_k91pg

Yeah, but as I said the Germans treated the British and the Western Allies differently.

They had a grudging respect for the British and I guess by extension for the Western Allies.

Not quite so good though if you were from the East.

BTW I earlier mentioned former Ukrainian president Viktor Yushchenko.

Did you know his father was a German POW?

He didn't get to spend time in some Stalag like Stalag Luft III or some place like Colditz.

He got to spend it in various concentration camps including Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Oh and there was a huge reason why the British were really gung ho about Red Cross, it was how they communicated with the POWs and how they got special kit for escapes to them.😉

Actually, it was more than just grudging respect, it ensured that their respective POW's were looked after. The Japanese considered it dishonorable to be a POW. so no respect even for the principles of the Red Cross. What the Red Cross distributed in the POW camps ( food parcels , medicine etc) was tightly regulated , do you know of any concrete examples of this? And of course there was also the Red Cross Messages, which may have contained codes? No, that's something I did not know about Victor Yushchenco's Father. So Victor is a chip off the old mans block... A remarkable man, ( Victor ) one of that select band of people who have survived an assassination attempt.

The Geneva Convention may have reached the conscience of many individual soldiers and commanders and prevented many war crimes and saved many civilian lives.