Uncle Sam and friends. You know, NATO. So, no, not the french.
France is a founding member of NATO.
There is zero chance of an American serviceman or woman setting foot in Ukraine.
NATO wont throw a boot lace into Ukraine.
Oh, did they rejoin?
This eejit going on about a balanced view while Putin is invading Ukraine 
There are some gas cunts out there
Vladimir Putin controls the supply chain of western technology, so who is bluffing?
Russia has the power to hobble key industries in the US and Europe by restricting supplies of metals
AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD22 February 2022 • 3:00pm
Vladimir Putin visits one of VSMPO-AVISMA’s titanium plants CREDIT: REUTERS/Alexsey Druginyn/RIA Novosti/Pool
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Parts of Moldova have internal border from Romania side into Russian side……
So, Putin is increasing his global leverage taking Ukraine.
Does that mean he isn’t interested in a War so to speak?
Surely War on a large scale hurts his business leanings.
Fox News broadcast and cheerlead a constant diet of Putinist propaganda.
Fox News do this so that what remains of democracy in the US can be demolished and replaced with a grotesque Putin like autocracy.
Fox News are not running the country mate, Joe Biden and the Democrats are.
Or maybe you think Joe is calling Tucker Carlson for advice?
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Tucker Carlson literally says he is on Russia’s side. His words.
He is the most influential right wing voice in America.
The west is compromised by Russia. I have continually said this. You have continually denied it.
The most dangerous area where the west is compromised is right wing America because ultimately the existence of the west is backstopped by American hard power, and if American hard power is controlled by an ideology which is allied to Russia, the west cannot survive.
Fox News and right wing America exist purely to serve kleptocracy, plutocracy.
The interests of the American kleptocrats perfectly align with Putin. Both want a world where power is ruthlessly exercised in the service of kleptocracy.
In Putins’ case, the power is that of a dictator, military power, and informational warfare - propaganda. In right wing America’s case, the power is economic and informational warfare. An all out culture war - a propaganda war. They use the propaganda war to sucker useful idiots into destroying their own democracy,
Putin wants to destroy democracy worldwide - primarily in service to blood and soil Russian nationalism, but almost as important, in the service of kleptocracy.
American kleptocrats are perfectly happy with that vision. They have no values. perfectly happy with a world where Putinist kleptocracy and dictatorship and American kleptocracy and quasi-dictatorship - ie. Trumpism or a future variant - ally with each other.
That is the decadence and depravity that is destroying the west.
But Democrats are in power mate. So there’s no point or sense in blaming Republicans, the right wing, Fox News, Tucker Carlson or any other journalist. You may as well blame aliens or Labour in the UK for not taking action. Biden is the commander in Chief, he controls NATO.
Putin perceives the woke West as weak and he is being proven correct.
You have been on here for weeks telling us about how and why the west should not get involved in this.
You have continually highlighted the negatives of sanctioning Russia. Why? As a warning as to why we in the west should not do it.
So you are telling us that you, in your own words, are weak.
This ain’t nothing to do with so called “wokeness”.
So called “wokeness” is the assertion of values. And it’s about freedom in its most basic sense. Which you claim to love but in fact hate.
Supporting and arming Ukraine and strangling Putin and Russia is about values and freedom in its most basic sense.
Genuine question. Will these sanctions have anywhere near the desired effect on Russia. They’ll run a surplus this year. Can they not go to the Chinese for a few bob if things get a bit tight? Plus it seems like imposing sanctions on Putins nearest and dearest in the Oligarch world is probably frivolous as they probably had the foresight to move whatever they needed weeks ago anyway.
I think people need to be clear here and define Putin as a cunt & not all Russians.
There appears to be no appetite from the Russian public to start a War.
Getting those of influence to remove Putin is the key to stopping these issues.
Finding someone to do that whilst NATO flirts with the idea of extending its membership currently seems far from likely to work.
That article @balbec posted sums up nicely where the “ West “ have fucked up over the past 20 years.
Whilst squabbling for internal power they’ve dropped the ball on what’s important in a Global sense.
Putin has been in a position of power to concentrate on these issues and now he has huge bargaining power.
You’ve had incidents of the Russians being responsible (directly or indirectly) for the shooting down of a passenger plane, the annexation of various pieces of Ukraine, their buddy hijacking a Ryanair plane in Belarus, running a cyber crime operation that has extorted hundreds of millions from businesses, governments and hospitals, yet all we’ve seen is some token sanctions which don’t seem to act as any sort of disincentive.
Putin knows that short of firing a rocket at the US or an EU member then nothing is going to happen in a military sense.
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€118 billion has been funnelled out of the IFSC to Russia. Ireland’s hands are not remotely clean here.
You’re just flailing about and lying now, so I’ll leave it at that.
Address the question or fuck off. Why has Putin chosen to act now rather than the four years Trump was in power? Did he get the OK from Tucker Carlson to invade? That’s your level of logic.
The words of former FBI director Robert Mueller in 2011. The question is, why was sod all done about it in the last 11 years. There has been massive institutional failure across almost every western country at multiple levels since then. The west has been asleep at the wheel.
Putin is the apex of world criminality in every sense.
*We are investigating groups in Asia, Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East. And we are seeing cross-pollination between groups that historically have not worked together. Criminals who may never meet, but who share one thing in common: greed. *
They may be former members of nation-state governments, security services, or the military. These individuals know who and what to target, and how best to do it. They are capitalists and entrepreneurs. But they are also master criminals who move easily between the licit and illicit worlds. And in some cases, these organizations are as forward-leaning as Fortune 500 companies.
This is not “The Sopranos,” with six guys sitting in a diner, shaking down a local business owner for $50 dollars a week. These criminal enterprises are making billions of dollars from human trafficking, health care fraud, computer intrusions, and copyright infringement. They are cornering the market on natural gas, oil, and precious metals, and selling to the highest bidder.
The sanctions will do nothing as Europe cannot afford the only sanctions that would actually hurt him (energy). He knows Europe will do nothing and any sanctions imposed by the US have trivial impact. He has completely out maneuvered Biden here.
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