Russia v Ukraine

[Red Phoenix]

3 minutes ago, Colonel Bumcunt said:

I don't think the two things are the same. In fact I know they aren't.  Neither physically nor politically.  Silly fucking girl.  

Does Twitter have a button to report really, really, cringe attempts of whatabouttery?  Fuck me, some of you really need to thin-out your Twitter feeds. 

 

Yeah it's whatabouttery, get her tweet removed. Maybe keep an eye on her and if she repeat offends she can eventually be cancelled.

 

The hypocrisy is off the charts though and we all know the US gov is one of the worst offenders on the planet for destroying countries in recent decades, there's no changing that fact.

[littletedwest]

38 minutes ago, Gnasher said:

Here's the so called serious and respected telegraph journalist Simon Heffer saying if Jeremy Corbyn gets elected he plans to re open the concentration camps.

 

 

 

Isn't he the cunt who wrote an anti Liverpool article johnson was blamed for or something like that?

Anyway he's a massive twat

[Red Phoenix]

Wouldn't Chris Bryant be best focused here instead of Abramovich, or is it all just an act?

 

 

[Arniepie]

2 minutes ago, littletedwest said:

Isn't he the cunt who wrote an anti Liverpool article johnson was blamed for or something like that?

Anyway he's a massive twat

I think johnson was editor at the time tbf so I'm assuming he proof read it?

[littletedwest]

Yeah vaguely remember that anyway both a pair of horrors

[Arniepie]

Probally going off topic a bit but what I find quite ironic is that the left are often portrayed as apologists for whoever the enemy is meant to be(corbyn on newsnight,yet back in the 30s it was the trade unions who went off to fight Franco,whilst the daily mail was saying what a great bunch of lads mussolini and Co where.

[Gnasher]

41 minutes ago, Colonel Bumcunt said:

Am I talking for anyone else here when I say I don't understand why this is posted? Where and when was it written? 

It's just mental.

 

 

[AngryOfTuebrook]

16 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

I think johnson was editor at the time tbf so I'm assuming he proof read it?

It was his job to read it, so the entitled feckless cunt probably never bothered.

[sir roger]

3 minutes ago, Arniepie said:

Probally going off topic a bit but what I find quite ironic is that the left are often portrayed as apologists for whoever the enemy is meant to be(corbyn on newsnight,yet back in the 30s it was the trade unions who went off to fight Franco,whilst the daily mail was saying what a great bunch of lads mussolini and Co where.

Not many toffs scrapping on Cable Street in the 1930's, well not on the right side anyway.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

 

[dockers_strike]

4 minutes ago, AngryOfTuebrook said:

 

Ha! Peston clearly hasnt tried transferring large amounts out of a bank! I had to jump through hoops just to transfer 23 grand to a BMW dealer in Hamburg in 2002!

[dockers_strike]

This is an interesting read.

 

The wishful thinking has begun. Core Europe is already persuading itself that Vladimir Putin will be sated with Donetsk and Luhansk, allowing European companies to keep selling Gucci bags and BMWs to Russia in exchange for commodities – after a stern lecture on international law, of course.

The US, UK, and Poland have reached the opposite conclusion, strongly suspecting that the military occupation of the Donbas is the springboard for a full invasion of Ukraine.

Bear in mind what Putin has lost by this action: he has killed the Minsk accord and therefore ended the possibility of controlling Kyiv’s foreign and security policy through the veto power of these two puppet regions.

If he left it there, he would emerge from this crisis in a weaker strategic position.

This stretches credulity, since two-thirds of the Russian army is coiled for a strike on the border, with little to stop them except Ukraine’s valiant but ill-armed reservists.

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Mr Putin is not even hiding his intention.

As he said in his diatribe last night, Ukraine was an artificial creation of the Bolsheviks after Brest-Litovsk in 1918 and “never had a tradition of genuine statehood”.

The Munich Security Summit over the weekend was a love-fest of transatlantic unity, a choreographed effort to show that all key countries agree on far-reaching sanctions if he attacks.

The words “massive” and “devastating” were repeated ad nauseam, as if it were an agreed script.

But this Potemkin unity is unlikely to alter the Kremlin calculus. The West cannot activate serious measures because it risks an asymmetric response – a lighter variant of ‘mutual assured destruction’ from the Cold War.

It is already well understood that Europe is a captive of Russian gas, and dares not eject Russia from the SWIFT system of international payments because it would suffer a more immediate crisis than fortress Russia itself.

Less understood is the technology angle.

Washington professes to have a killer weapon that avoids such a risk of blowback and will therefore cause Putin to hesitate: it threatens to cut off Russian access to the global market for semiconductor chips.

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This would be the modern equivalent of a 20th century oil embargo, since chips are the critical fuel of the electronic economy.

It would gradually asphyxiate Russia’s advanced industries, and would in theory reduce Putin’s regime to a stunted technological dwarf.

But this too is a dangerous game. Putin has the means to cut off critical minerals and gases needed to sustain the West’s supply chain for semiconductor chips, upping the ante in the middle of a worldwide chip crunch.

Furthermore, he could hobble the aerospace and armaments industry in the US and Europe by restricting supply of titanium, palladium, and other metals.

If he controlled Ukraine, his control over key strategic minerals would be even more dominant, giving him leverage akin to Opec’s energy stranglehold in 1973.

The Kremlin could unleash an inflation shock every bit as violent as the first oil crisis, with a recession to match.

The White House has been slow to wake up to Russia’s counter-strike capability. It did not canvas US semiconductor companies on the risk until the critical materials firm Technet revealed the extent of US dependency on Russian supply of C4F6 gas, neon, palladium, scandium.

Some 90pc of the world supply of neon, used as laser gas for chip lithography, comes from Russia and Ukraine. Two-thirds of this is purified for the global market by one company in Odessa. There are other long-term sources of neon in Africa but that is irrelevant in the short run.

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Technet said Russian C4F6 gas is used for etching node logic devices. Palladium is used for sensors, plating material and computer memory (MRAM).

The world’s biggest producer of titanium is VSMPO-AVISMA, located in the ‘Titanium Valley’ of Western Siberia.

It is owned by Rostec, the state conglomerate controlled by Sergey Chemezov, an ex-KGB operative who served with Putin in East Germany. Russia and Ukraine together account for 30pc of the global supply of titanium, but this understates their hegemony over the production chain.

VSMPO-AVISMA supplies 35pc of Boeing’s titanium, mostly for 737, 767, 777, and 787 jets. It is used in engines, fans, disks and frames, prized for its resistance to heat and corrosion, and for its ratio of weight to strength.

The US Bureau of Industry and Security published a report last October warning that VSMPO-AVISMA was providing titanium sponge to customers in the US at “artificially low” prices, with Russian state support, enabling it to capture a “significant share of Boeing's business”.

This should have raised a red flag. Weeks later Boeing committed to even deeper ties with the company.

In effect, Russia has been doing what China did earlier with rare earth metals: establishing a lockhold by selling below cost and knocking out the Western supply chain. The report said Russia is increasingly able to use this dominance “as a tool of geopolitical leverage”.

The Bureau warned that the US is down to one ageing plant capable of producing titanium sponge at scale, and no longer has any titanium reserve in the National Defense Stockpile.

It relies on supply from a hostile state-controlled entity to build US fighter jets, rockets, missiles, submarines, helicopters, satellites, and advanced weaponry. The report called for urgent measures to rebuild domestic production and acquire strategic reserves. What a shambles.

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Airbus is even more vulnerable. Half its titanium sponge comes from Russia.

Britain’s aerospace industry depends on Russian supply. VSMPO-AVISMA has an operation near Birmingham, making commercial alloys for aerospace, medical technology, and the military.

Mr Putin knows that the pain threshold in the West is low after the fiasco of US sanctions against the aluminium producer Rusal in 2018.

The US Treasury thought aluminium was a fungible commodity and that cutting off Rusal supply would not matter much.

It learned a harsh lesson in market reality: global alumina prices doubled; the supply chain seized up; and there was collateral damage everywhere.

The bureaucrats had failed to understand the stringent certification process in the industry. But the point is deeper. Russia cannot be strangled because it is systemically central to the world economy.

Nor can Washington easily deny Russia semiconductor chips over the long run. The country has its own home-grown chip companies, led by Baikal and Micron.

They can make mid-grade chips down to 28-nanometres (nm), adequate for mobile phones and the like. These companies could undoubtedly raise their game if it were a top national priority.

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Russia cannot make 5nm and 7nm wafers needed for 5G mobile, artificial intelligence, or CPU and GPU technology.

The US controls the global ecosystem of advanced chips and could prevent Taiwan’s TSMC or Korea’s Samsung from supplying Russia. It would hurt over time.

But the semiconductor chain is notoriously complex and populated by middlemen.

Russia could fall back on China to supply microchips for its weapons Credit: Yuri Smityuk\TASS via Getty Images

“There would be all kinds of work arounds: Russia wouldn’t be able to get the cutting edge stuff but it could get by with intermediate chips for most of its weapons,” said James Lewis, technology director at Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies.

“They can always fall back on the Chinese, and this would dilute the sanctions. It would not be easy for Russia because you can’t just switch over. Everything has to be redesigned to accept the Chinese chips, and they’re not the best either. It would set them back two or three years,” he said.

Chinese companies were reluctant to breach US sanctions after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It is a different world today. Xi Jinping has made it illegal for them to comply with US extraterritorial sanctions.

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Even if the strategic deal between Russia and China at the Beijing Winter Olympics is overstated, Xi must have given Putin a green light of sorts over Ukraine.

Otherwise Russia would not have pulled most of its military forces out of the Far East to wage war in the West, leaving the Chinese border exposed.

Once you drill into the menu of western sanctions, it becomes painfully clear that the economic deterrent does not add up, either because the measures are less than they seem or because retaliation risk makes them unusable.

The Munich conference was a three-day obfuscation of this fact, a ritual of collective denial, a pretence that anything short of weapons for Ukraine actually matters.

The venue of Munich was all too fitting. The fate of Ukraine’s people is not so different from the story of the Czechs in September 1938.

 

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/02/22/vladimir-putin-controls-supply-chain-western-technology-bluffing/

[Rico1304]

38 minutes ago, dockers_strike said:

Ha! Peston clearly hasnt tried transferring large amounts out of a bank! I had to jump through hoops just to transfer 23 grand to a BMW dealer in Hamburg in 2002!

Ha ha ha ha violins at the ready. 
 

 

[Section_31]

@dockers_strike that jives with what I read recently, was gonna post it but lost the link. Basically saying Putin felt the reason the USSR lost was because it lacked financial muscle to compete, and that Russia needed to create its own capitalists to devour western capitalists.

 

When you look at the fact the Tory party is bought and paid for by them, that they have a stranglehold over gas and oil, that London is awash with their dirty cash, as was Trump, and the Chinese basically have our university system begging for breadcrumbs and our supply chain over a barrel, I suspect there's some merit in the strategy.

 

They've used our own top table's greed against us.

[Captain Howdy]

I thought Putin said they were only doing exercises in the region? I believed him as well, he seems so trustworthy.

[halewood pete]

[Megadrive Man]

2 hours ago, Red Phoenix said:

Wouldn't Chris Bryant be best focused here instead of Abramovich, or is it all just an act?

 

 

 

How did the son of a KGB agent get a seat in the house of Lords.  Who on earth would sign off on that?

[Bruce Spanner]

2 minutes ago, MegadriveMan said:

 

How did the son of a KGB agent get a seat in the house of Lords.  Who on earth would sign off on that?

 

Sarcasm or not?

 

It was one of Alex's first decrees.

 

The full list of people he has given ermine robes and pensions for life is quite eye opening, including his brother...

[Ne Moe Imya]

48 minutes ago, halewood pete said:

This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a teacher in Moscow about communism.

 

"Why is it," I asked, "that every socialist or communist country has ultimately ended up as a totalitarian state? Wouldn't it be possible, in theory, to have a socialist country that was also a liberal democracy?"

 

He explained it to me using the following example: 

 

Suppose you have 10 people who live at the end of a dirt road. They would all love for the road to be paved, in fact, they would willingly pay £10,000 each to have the road paved. So they go to a contractor, who says he can do the whole job for £70,000.

 

"Great!" they all think. "I would happily have paid £10,000 to see it happen, but now I only have to pay £7,000 and we can have a paved road."

 

But one of the neighbors, a sneaky, selfish fellow, says "Nah, I'm not going to pay." He knows that it will still come to under £8000/person, and it will still be worth it for everyone, and they will pay to have the road paved. He will get the benefits, but without having to chip in.

 

But then, of course, there is an uproar among the other neighbors - no one wants to pay any more, because it's unfair. One person says "if he doesn't pay, then neither will I," a few more follow suit, and pretty soon the project is canceled and the neighborhood committee dissolved in mutual disgust at one another.

 

"So what's the solution?" he asked me. I looked at him blankly, unsure. "You have to shoot the first person, the selfish one, in the head," he said. "You can't have socialism AND freedom."

 

I still think about this all the time.

[dockers_strike]

5 minutes ago, Ne Moe Imya said:

This reminds me of a conversation I once had with a teacher in Moscow about communism.

 

"Why is it," I asked, "that every socialist or communist country has ultimately ended up as a totalitarian state? Wouldn't it be possible, in theory, to have a socialist country that was also a liberal democracy?"

 

He explained it to me using the following example: 

 

Suppose you have 10 people who live at the end of a dirt road. They would all love for the road to be paved, in fact, they would willingly pay £10,000 each to have the road paved. So they go to a contractor, who says he can do the whole job for £70,000.

 

"Great!" they all think. "I would happily have paid £10,000 to see it happen, but now I only have to pay £7,000 and we can have a paved road."

 

But one of the neighbors, a sneaky, selfish fellow, says "Nah, I'm not going to pay." He knows that it will still come to under £8000/person, and it will still be worth it for everyone, and they will pay to have the road paved. He will get the benefits, but without having to chip in.

 

But then, of course, there is an uproar among the other neighbors - no one wants to pay any more, because it's unfair. One person says "if he doesn't pay, then neither will I," a few more follow suit, and pretty soon the project is canceled and the neighborhood committee dissolved in mutual disgust at one another.

 

"So what's the solution?" he asked me. I looked at him blankly, unsure. "You have to shoot the first person, the selfish one, in the head," he said. "You can't have socialism AND freedom."

 

I still think about this all the time.

Love gallows humour, me.

 

The way I see it is if everyone wants to live under a communist or any other type of regime, then crack on, the will of the majority should prevail.

 

Sadly, it doesnt always work like that in reality.

[SasaS]

Joe is milking the suspense with the delayed speech. Or just having an unscheduled nap.

[Kepler-186]

Putin playing Modern Warfare 2 “No Russian” tonight I reckon. 
 

 

 

 

[Section_31]

When you see members of Reagan's own party criticizing their own president and standing up for the Russians, how can you not think Putin is a long game, Machiavellian genius?

[Anubis]

At least this thread has brought some humour to proceedings.

 

 

 

[Captain Howdy]

1 hour ago, SasaS said:

Joe is milking the suspense with the delayed speech. Or just having an unscheduled nap.

Definitely should be an age limit on running for office. That dude is just tooooo old. Life isn’t a prog rock anthem where a kindly wizened old man imparts pearls of wisdom.