Sanctions against Russia

[onetrack]

With those bloated jowls, I reckon he's got 6 or 12 mths, before a heart attack nails him. A classic indicator of major circulatory problems.

[Old Koreelah]

On 24/3/2023 at 10:23 PM, willedoo said:

The Russian pilot who collided with the American MQ-9 Reaper drone in the Black Sea has been awarded the Order of Courage medal. I guess they don't have a medal for bad piloting.

 

Bad piloting? He flew a twenty-tonne supersonic jet just close enough to a slow drone to bend one of its prop blades. That’s surgical. 

[onetrack]

Quote

...That’s surgical. 

I'd suggest the drone-hitting exercise was more like an incompetent car driver backing into a visible post. "BANG!" ... "Did I hit something?"

[Old Koreelah]

Perhaps, but don’t forget Russia has produced some of the best pilots.

It would have been in their interest to inflict minimal damage, just enough to cause it to land in range of their retrieval team.

[Marty_d]

I think you're giving too much credit OK.  No decent pilot is going to deliberately put his very expensive aircraft at risk by ingesting part of the drone or causing damage, especially one who flies for an unforgiving autocratic regime.

[willedoo]

I agree Marty; I'm with the Yanks on this one. They think the collision wasn't intentional, just pilot miscalculation. The Kremlin knows they are the laughing stock of the world since the start of the invasion, so giving the bloke a gong is for the domestic audience. They know they can't stop the world laughing at them, so they are trying to stop their own from doing it.

[willedoo]

I think this one dates back to some time last year.

 

[willedoo]

putler's worst fear of having a NATO country on his border is getting closer. The Turkish Parliament has voted to approve Finland’s NATO membership application, so now all 30 NATO members have approved it.

[willedoo]

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has said Finland will formally join the alliance in the coming days. Not sure what he means by the coming days, either very soon or some time later. It's a big thing for Finland's security. If putler attacks Finland, he will be at war with NATO. In all honesty, I don't think he's got the resources to spread his wings any further.

 

Another aspect is that if other NATO countries station gear and force contingents in Finland, putin has to allocate already stretched military assets in the area to balance it. 

[kgwilson]

The latest I heard is that Putin is considering swapping food for ammo with North Korea.

[willedoo]

7 minutes ago, kgwilson said:

The latest I heard is that Putin is considering swapping food for ammo with North Korea.

I wonder if little rocket man would do that. You would think he'd be hesitant to run down his own supplies, but maybe he's got lots of old stock of artillery shells. Shells is what putin would be wanting; nuclear aside, his army is nothing without artillery. It's the only way they know how to fight - shell a place into rubble, then occupy it when it's totally flattened and worthless.

[onetrack]

I can't see where NK has the capacity to supply any serious level of armaments to Russia. There's only 25M of them, a whisker less than us - and even with a bit more food, their military output still wouldn't amount to any more than Australia could produce.

[willedoo]

That's also a long way to train ammo, right across Russia on the Trans Siberian line. Plenty of opportunity for saboteurs and resistance groups to do their thing.

[onetrack]

There may also be some kind of crafty scheme in the Little Fat Wuns rat-cunning mind, to garner armaments from China, in exchange for some higher level of basic minerals that China needs, and then send the Chinese weapons to Putin. That would simply mean he would just gear up current mining output and not have to gear up to produce increased levels of missiles and ammunition. It takes time to do that.

[onetrack]

It's also possible that the Little Fat Wun sees an opportunity here to play Russia against China. A NK cosying up to Russia, would more than likely greatly annoy China, as it would see its power over NK reduced. I wasn't aware just how much antipathy, and even dislike, there is of China within NK, until I read the fairly recent intelligence article, below.

 

The Norks see China as being too dominating and interfering, and are frightened of the Chinese exerting more political and cultural power over NK. So cosying up to Russia probably suits their classic act of playing one superpower against another.

 

https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/2022-01/China-North_Korea_Strategic_Rift.pdf

[red750]

Russia deploying 70 year old tanks.

[Old Koreelah]

6 hours ago, kgwilson said:

The latest I heard is that Putin is considering swapping food for ammo with North Korea.

A perfect trade: the Kim dynasty has surely amasses lots of ammunition for it’s future war of expansion, but can’t even feed it’s enormous army, let alone the general population.

[Old Koreelah]

6 hours ago, willedoo said:

…his army is nothing without artillery. It's the only way they know how to fight - shell a place into rubble, then occupy it when it's totally flattened and worthless.

A knew an old mechanic who described how the Luftwaffe abandoned his Czech airbase before the Red Army got there. Instead of just taking over the impressive facilities, the Soviets blasted everything to oblivion.

When they arrived they set about rebuilding.

[willedoo]

Luka has been babbling in a speech to the brain dead faithful that Poland is planning to invade Belarus. He said only putler's nukes stationed on Belorussian soil will prevent it.

 

[willedoo]

This is putler trying to convince his alcoholic mate medvedev that everything is going according to plan.

 

[onetrack]

It's said that a feature of the Russians is that they never smile. If someone is smiling at them, they believe that person is setting out to scam them, or undermine them. It must truly be a happy place today.

[kgwilson]

That was what we all noticed when crossing the border back into Poland (which was then under Soviet rule) in 1974 in a Combi van. The Polish border guard smiled & joked with us. For the 10 days we'd been in Russia, well direct to Moscow & back through Belarus with a Russian chaperone, none of us could remember anyone smiling. So it's not a new phenomenon. They probably don't know how to.

 

Actually at the time I didn't even know Belarus existed. We were not allowed to stop there.

[Old Koreelah]

8 hours ago, kgwilson said:

…The Polish border guard smiled & joked with us. For the 10 days we'd been in Russia, well direct to Moscow & back through Belarus with a Russian chaperone, none of us could remember anyone smiling.

We had a similar experience each time we crossed the border from USA into Canada.

[Bruce Tuncks]

There was a bunch of big but cheap tractors called "Belarus" sold here 30 years ago. We looked it up, and sure enough there was such a place on the map. They were not very good tractors or they would have been on sale longer.

[Bruce Tuncks]

I just read that Russia has been made the chair of the UN security council for a month.

This madness will destroy the UN. Russia is a terrorist state and it should be expelled from the UN.