Oh shit, the government must be terrified that the population is calling their bluff. The whole idea behind this scheme was that they thought nobody would put their money where their mouth was and the gov would have plausible deniability for not issuing any more visas due to lack of sponsors
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Opinion piece by the chief executive of the Refugee Council:
P.S.
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UK to impose sanctions on 370 more Russians
(updated version of Guardian article posted earlier)
The UK is to impose sanctions on 370 more Russian individuals, including more than 50 oligarchs and their families with a combined net worth of £100bn, in the latest raft of measures against Vladimir Putin’s regime.
More than 1,000 individuals and entities have now been targeted with sanctions since the invasion of Ukraine, with fresh measures announced against key Kremlin spokespeople and political allies of Putin, including the defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, considered a member of his elite inner circle of advisers known as his siloviki.
Other key political figures placed under sanction include the prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, and former president Dmitry Medvedev, as well as Putin’s press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, and foreign affairs spokesperson, Maria Zakharova .
P.S.
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Time for the Ukrainians to get out their hammers and nails. /s
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How does spiking trees stop them being cut down?
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It saves the next tree, because now your chainsaw needs repair.
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Lumberjacks get more reluctant to apply their metal saws to trees when they might have a surprise encounter with a metal object within the wood.
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Tree spiking can damage saws and potentially hurt the logger cutting the spiked tree
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What she did was extremely brave and it seems highly likely that Putin’s treatment of her will be harsh. Her lawyers currently don’t even know where she is.
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My understanding was that it’s more likely to cause damage to the saw blades at the saw mill when the tree trunks are being cut lengthwise. That was the cause of a famous gruesome injury of a mill worker in 1987 that led to a lot of anti-spiking legislation.
Either way, it’s really not a good idea. It’s one of those things like laying land mines that could cause death or injury many years after the conflict is over. And the victims could be completely innocent forest workers who are doing legitimate forest thinning, felling dead or diseased trees, for example.
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She’s been “disappeared”, to use the term that’s become inextricably linked with any authoritarian regime.
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It depends on where the spike is placed.
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No-one answering is making a judgement call here, although given the nature of the community I expect most of us would agree with you.
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Given that five people so far “liked” the comment
I assumed that some people here may be in favor of the tactic and just wanted to make it clear why I’m not.
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I wrote that comment, and even I’m not really advocating for them doing that, it was more of a tongue in cheek comment.
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I can’t speak for others, but that’s how I took it. Reading your other comments I’ve never gotten the impression you’d seriously advocate for irresponsible forms of pro-ecology “monkey-wrenching”.
I do hope (and really expect) that Ukrainians would come up with clever and creative ways to sabotage such a wantonly destructive Russian plan without putting innocent people in harm’s way.
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