Will EU comply?
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Indeed. Thank you. I made a comment about phones and armies - in the context of the not overly professional Russian army. The comment about prisons may have helped to illustrate that any such rule is hard to enforce but I’m sure we all realise that, even though there is no evidence at all that the Russians even had, let alone tried to enforce, any such rule about phones being taken into combat zones. 
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To be fair, I think all armies are wrestling with how to deal with the cost/benefit analysis of their troops’ smartphones. These devices have quickly become must-have companions for most humans in a relatively short time.
That said, I agree that one would expect some kind of lockdown/silence measure during the initial stages of a surprise invasion. But again, we’re talking about the Russian army.
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It seems it was only a surprise to the Russian troops and commanders! 
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Just think of the roaming charges
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You can always buy a cheap local SIMCARD. I am pretty sure enemy nations will give it to the soldiers.
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Wars in the EU will not have roaming charges. Admit Ukraine to the EU, STAT!
(EU has banned roaming charges. Since Brexit, several UK providers have reintroduced them. UK soldiers can no longer afford to go to war in EU. This may be the downfall of NATO.) /s
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As someone said earlier, it was a surprise attack as in “Surprise, you’re attacking!”
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The perfect excuse for govts to demand ID for every SIM card sale. (They all want to stop people being able to buy burners.)
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That was me. Gotta find the humour in dark situations.
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Sometimes I have that same impression. It’s like they had to run to invade, I don’t know, maybe they were afraid of the reaction of the locals and the western weapons deliveries.
Or was it just good old-fashioned sheer incompetence?
We will never know.
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It doesn’t look like it wasn’t a surprise to the Biden admin. They were sending arms in December for an expected invasion. Looks like the intell services got it right this time. And there was someone in office who listened to them instead asking for reports in cartoon format & then flushed them down the toilet.
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That’ll be hard sale, though. Turkey would be livid – even though Erdogan did everything to move Turkey away from the EU, they have good reason to remember that the EU stalled too.
Ukraine, per GDP, is poorer than Poland with about the same population numbers. It’s even poorer than Bulgaria, but far more corrupt than Bulgaria, which is the most corrupt EU member. Still better than Russia, but not by much.
The EU is under severe stress as it is.
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As far as Russia and smartphones, they did pass a law banning them in the military and there are stories about soldiers getting jail time for using them.
Does that mean soldiers aren’t using them in combat? I don’t know.
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It’s an unusual situation for sure. The 1944 D-Day invasion was kept under extraordinarily tight security (including faked war games to cover real manoeuvres). When it happened, though, the Allied troops weren’t as bewildered about what was happening as a lot of these Russians are.
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The intel services got it right in 2003, too. They just happened to lie on the side of caution.
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I think its pretty well established from phone gps data that they are using their phones
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It was too good to be true.
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