People say, “It would be irrational if Putin were to use nuclear weapons. It would be self-defeating. He would just get destroyed himself in retaliation.” And the answer is: from our point of view, certainly that would be really stupid. Just like this war. Starting this war looks really stupid, from our point of view.
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But…but that’s the entire business model of the higher tier of UK law firms! And of the entire City
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Nooooo! Offshore shell companies purchasing real estate for oligarchs (and just general rich people) is still a big business too.
Honestly, from when I have to encounter lawyers, I wonder how do you go home and kiss your kids after work? I know I have to, and have a shower, after encountering them.
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UK armed forces would last just ‘five days’ in a war, senior MP warns
Tory chair of defence committee says cost of replacing kit sent to Ukraine and high inflation had created ‘a really grim picture’
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This letter was not just a one-off oddity, but appears part of a coordinated campaign directed at both refugees and the wider public in countries supporting the Ukrainian war effort.
The campaign began around 20 January. Posts circulated in diaspora and refugee Telegram groups in Lithuania and Latvia, warning that the authorities in those countries were collecting information on Ukrainian men so they could be deported for military service at home.
These posts included images of purported forms that Ukrainian men had to fill out for the Lithuanian and then Latvian migration departments:
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Auchan is a French company that has not left the Russian market.
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Macron issues updated guidance on protecting Russia’s feelings. Apparently the ‘off ramp’ and ‘humiliation’ are no longer critical; but it’s still vital that they experience the war purely as a discretionary foreign adventure free of blowback.
Incidentally, does anyone know who he is talking to about the need to abstain from plans of forcible regime change? I’ve seen a great many suggestions that a delegitimizing loss will leave the regime vulnerable to its internal enemies; but I can’t think of anyone who has been raring to fight past the Ukrainian border, aside from a modest volume of air and drone strikes against assorted military targets.
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He’s probably talking about Western non-military support for Navalny and other more liberal domestic political opponents of Putin. It’s a sop to the Kremlin: if you pull out of Ukraine, we in the West won’t tell any Russian who’ll listen that you wasted a lot of Russian lives and made your country an international military laughingstock for nothing.
I’m not sure how much this promise will mean to Putin. The reality is that his regime broke its deal with the Russian people (“we won’t interfere in your personal lives, you’ll let us rob the country blind”) based on his propagandists’ unfulfilled promises of territorial expansion and national glory. Even without Western interference, there will be political consequences for that.
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That ranks for cluelessness with TFG’s decision to buy Greenland. Could it be that Pootie is not the brilliant scholar of history we thought he was?
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Putin espouses a mythical version of Russian history in which modern Russia is one with ancient Kievan Rus and Ukraine has therefore always been Russian.
Stalin grabbed a chunk of eastern Poland (including Lwów/Lviv), so Putin probably assumed that Polish nationalists were rabid irredentists who would love to grab it back.
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A Polish colleague who had grown up in Poland told me a joke from the Cold War era.
Q: Poland is invaded simultaneously by Germans from the west and Russians from the east. Whom do you shoot at first?
A: You shoot at the Germans first, of course. Business before pleasure.
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Because France doesn’t want to get nuked, and if we try to force Putin by invading his country and hunting him down like the rabid dog he is, he will use his nukes against all his enemies, perceived or real, foreign and domestic. Remember, the Russian nuclear launch system assumes nobody in the chain of command wants to use nuclear weapons, so has few if any humans in the command chain once the order to launch is given. Much like in the US, the people manning the missiles don’t even know if it is a drill or not until they’ve initiated the launch sequence. MAD at its ‘finest.’
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