Ukraine

I must remember to close my curtains, the Police did tell me about this.

 

It looks like Russia is on course to ensure its own self destruction. That is, if you believe the liars:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Wednesday that Moscow's military "tasks" in Ukraine now went beyond the eastern Donbas region, in the clearest acknowledgment yet that its war goals have expanded in the past five months.

 

Their goal was to take the whole of Ukraine from the outset, and anticipating no outside help, former Soviet states would align with Russia for their own safety and the Soviet Union would be rebuilt.

 

Interesting factoid:

Russian Central Bank chair Elvira Nabiullina told Putin that the war was ‘flushing the economy down the sewer’ during a video conference, he apparently simply ended the call.

 

Putin has nothing to lose and everything to gain. He has wealth locked up safe all over the place. He has safe havens in plenty of places, so even if Russia was to somehow be wiped off the face of the earth, he'd be ok. This means he can afford to gamble. If he loses, he gets to live out his last few years on a super yacht moored in some nice location. If he wins he goes down in history as the man who stood up to the world and rebuilt the USSR.

I'm personally in favour of NATO and the EU supporting Ukraine any way we can. But there needs to be a two pronged approach. We need to be telling Putin we won't just allow him to invade his neighbours, while at the same time using diplomacy to actually build peace. Instead of further isolating Russia and forcing Putin further into a corner, there needs to be offers of trade and science collaboration on offer to any country that's willing to collaborate on peaceful initiatives. That would include Russia if they back off, but it would also include other countries we try to isolate. Iran springs to mind. We had a nuclear treaty with them til Trump scrapped it. Trump also scrapped the nuclear treaty with Russia. I'm absolutely not siding with Putin, in fact the opposite. But while our politicians are acting like drunken fools in the pub, sticking their chests out and asking their mates to hold them back while shouting at each other, there's no way this can end peacefully.

 

Putin has a mindset and the only voice he hears is his own. I can't see him negotiating with anyone.

 

One on Putin's ex advisers (who had to run for his life) was on the TV the other day - he was saying that Putin will only stop when he is forced to stop. It will be a long war - determined by who has access to the most lethal weaponry. NATO spend 1 trillion bucks a year on defense - Russia spends 70 billion. It all boils down to who can fund the war for the longest.

You learn something everyday. The UK provide gas to Europe - never knew that.

Britain may stop supplying gas to mainland Europe if the country is hit by extreme shortages in the coming months, it has emerged.

National Grid could cut off gas pipelines to the Netherlands and Belgium under emergency measures as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine puts pressure on global energy supplies.

I hope that this doesn't happen - we are no longer in the EU - but we are still part of Europe - we need to act collectively to make sure that Putin regrets his decision to invade Ukraine.

Oil prices are reducing and so is Putin's income - but then a pocket full of Rubles is worthless if you can't get to the shops.

 

That's what the space race was all about. It was an economic war with a convenient byproduct being rapid technological advance, primarily in the weapons industry. Intercontinental ballistic missiles are built on technology proven by space rockets for example. Much of the tech we take for granted can be attributed to the economic war between USA and USSR. Without it, there'd be no satnav, international communication would still be terrible quality and expensive, and the internet wouldn't exist (little known fact, the infrastructure that the early internet was based on started life as a military collaboration in NATO, as means to ensure highly resilient communications in case of nuclear war. As the USSR started to fall apart and relations with Russia improved, it became hard to justify the expense of maintaining that Comms infrastructure so it was opened up to the private sector, and an enterprising Tim Berners Lee and his friends built that start of the internet).

Nowadays we're in another tech race, driven once again by threat of global war. I've seen an article that the eurofighter typhoon is getting a state of the art electronic warfare upgrade to tide us over til Tempest is ready (it's really worth reading about the tempest project, the tech ideas in there are just out of this world). And just yesterday I read in the news that we're developing a reusable hypersonic delivery system. The article doesn't specifically say it's for war but I can't think of many uses for a reusable Mach 5 drone that can carry a payload.

 

And back engineering the alien technology recovered from the Roswell crash....

But then - that's an entirely new thread....

 

The most interesting part of that is the rapid cooling system on the air inlet of the jet engine, developed by Reaction Engines over the past few decades in the UK.
The fact that the project involves the RAF, the UK Defense,Science and Technology Laboratory would indicate it's not meant for delivering greeting cards.

 

Yeah I too am amazed by what they've achieved there. I can't get my head round it. Cooling air from over 1000 degrees C to zero in about a millisecond.

 

Putin won't like this - European countries supporting each other - this is what stable democratic countries do Putin.

Over the past few months, the UK has come to the rescue of several EU nations, including France by exporting record amounts of electricity, despite facing an energy crisis of its own.

Slava Ukraini.

 

Who's Slava Ukraini?