My shitting pants are on tonight
Not that any of this is about me, but I’m a few thousand yards from the only military target for hundreds of miles
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Well, remember this…
No way, no how, would it be like Red Dawn or The Postman or Mad Max. /s
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German energy minister Habeck says Gazprom has worked towards the current moment…
Ok, I’m a glass of wine and 1 sidecar into the evening, or I’d do a better job of figuring it out for myself (& also, thank goodness for spellchecker) – but how did (West) Germany make it thru the winter before 1991 or so? I mean, they did, right? Presumably without help from The East?
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UkraineToday, Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida outlined the main points of new sanctions against Russia.
- The freezing of assets of certain Russian individuals and organizations.
- The suspension of the issuance of visas for Russian individuals and organizations.
- Export controls on semiconductors and other high technology.
The Japanese press is saying that Taiwan is also onboard for point 3, which will have the effect of severely limiting Russian access to high technology.
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Won’t they just get ICs laundered through China?
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Don’t know about the rest of Europe, but we Germans bought gas from the ussr since 1970s.
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They can, but that adds a lot of extra cost and logistical considerations, including having to buy them piecemeal. The sanctions will apply to Japanese and Taiwanese companies operating in China, so it won’t be a matter of simply going to the factories in China to buy direct.
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Nope. Gas from the Soviet Union was always a big part of the German energy mix. It never used to be a problem, even during the height of the cold war
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TIL, the Russian Federation presides (I.e. their representative serves as President) over the UN Security Council. How fscked up is that?
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Back here in the US, Pro-Ukraine activist protests in NYC got a visiting Russian conductor and a Russian pianist — both pro-Putin — to cancel out of their planned Carnegie Hall concert, i.e., they got the boot. Same may happen in Milan: If only it were that easy when it comes to homegrown pro-Putin traitors.
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I’d say the height of the cold war was around the cuban missile crisis. After that it was a stable deep freeze, with increasing trade. The USSR then built pipelines to the Western parts or their country, including Ukraine. Transgas, which got expanded to the West in 1970or so.
See The Living Daylights, where Bond travels trough a pipeline from Czechoslovakia to Austria.
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The Security council was fucked up since its inception. It’s basically a “we are the guys with nukes” club which lets medium-powers play along for a limited time to make it look inclusive.
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One group of bastards endorses another.
Myanmar’s military junta expressed support on Friday for Russia’s attack on Ukraine, even as a group of officials from Myanmar’s shadow civilian government took the opposite position.
“In the case of Russia and Ukraine, Russia has done its part to maintain its sovereignty, and I think it is the right thing to do,” the spokesman for the junta, Maj. Gen. Zaw Min Tun, told The New York Times by telephone. “Russia is also a big country among world powers and is showing that it also plays a main role in the balance sheet of maintaining world peace.”
Duwa Lashi La, the acting president of the National Unity Government in Myanmar, said on Twitter that those in the government “strongly condemn the unprovoked attack on Ukraine that undermines the UN charter and international law.”
“We pray for the people of Ukraine as they face catastrophic suffering from this unjustified invasion,” he wrote.
The National Unity Government is made up of a group of deposed officials who banded together after generals in Myanmar seized power in a coup in February 2021.
Since the coup, the generals have cultivated closer ties with Moscow. Russia is a major supplier of arms to the junta, and senior military officers from each country visited their counterparts several times last year. In June, Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the leader of Myanmar’s junta, traveled to Russia to meet with the country’s defense minister.
The junta is also courting Russia to invest in sectors like fuel, natural gas, cement and electric public transit in Myanmar.
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