Some of them looked like they had just been to the Chelsea Drugstore.
The new,improved CCCC preparing for a summer of red card appeals?
They’ll have to change their name to the CCCP.
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What time is throw in been moved to?
Simon Coveny needs to call the Russian ambassador in for a chat and tell him Paddy is not happy.
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Has anybody here considered the possibly that Russia might actually invade?
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Putin looks like he is going to take the two bits of Ukraine and then he is going to dare Ukraine to do something about it.
He’s making a play to force the Allies to either back off or to give him a pretext to invade.
He’s betting the West haven’t the balls for the sanctions
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I’m not sure you picked up on the nuance there of my post.
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It basically what he’s been doing for years and getting away with it. The “west” are going to have to call a halt to his gallop eventually.
How does he gain anything from just “taking the two bits”?
It makes him feel like a big man?
What do you think Ukraine will do ?
They’ll do nathin
That would be all he achieves if he “takes the two bits”.
Putin’s original plan was to force the DNR and LNR back into Ukraine as trojan horses to hijack the whole country. Now that’s gone. So if he stops here, strategically he has lost, and if the west has any spine, it will now slap a load of sanctions on him (though I wouldn’t hold my breath on that score).
The DNR/LNR are also Mad Max style lawless ghettoes which are a nuisance to him.
But even if the west doesn’t slap sanctions on him - and they absolutely should - stopping here would be a strategic defeat because Ukraine would be radicalised against him and fiercely pro-western - the very thing he could not countenance. The very problem that has caused Putin to act Billy Big Balls would still be there, except worse.
So it makes no sense for him to stop here.
But neither does it make sense to invade further - not to any rational person anyway. But Putin looks like he is no longer rational.
He has manoeuvred himself into a very tight corner.
Make a lot of noise. Try to get the West to do something. Maybe ramp up the fighting down there, but they can’t give Russia a pretext to invade the whole country either.
If the west impose sanctions now they’ve nothing in their arsenal to stop him invading the rest of it. A balancing act for them
I think he’d be slow to actually invade, the Ukrainians are well primed at this stage and they’d have the whole of the west sending them weapons and money. They are no mugs, they’ve been fighting the Russians for nearly a decade.
For all the talk of 150k to 200k troops on the border that’s nowhere near enough. The Ukrainians will mobilise big time if they did. They would have to fight for every inch you’d imagine
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Putin is speaking now. From the early part of what he is saying he appears intent on invasion. Trying to make out that Ukraine is an indivisible part of Russia.
He’s talking live on Sky News for the last 10 minutes or so.
Giving a good high level review of russian history over the last 100 years.
A load of fake history based on eternal fake victimhood.
The other day his spin doctor Vladislav Surkov was claiming that Russia should retake all the land held by the Russian Empire, which would cut way into current day Poland.
Putin is repeating that insanity here.