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I think that some really bad **** is becoming very concerning.
What say you?

Nancy says borders are inviolable. Send our sons to die for them.

I thought Trump was Hitler?
Now Putin is Hitler?

I wonder if Putin takes over Ukraine he'll finish the investigation and find out ol' Bidey and his boy Hunter are corrupt as fook and release the information?

That'd be hilarious.

NINE!

All I hear is the Military Industrial Complex ramping up and incumbents feeling good about themselves.

It’s for the country and the children!

How many billions in military equipment are we going to leave there???

Where Is Germany in the Ukraine Standoff? Its Allies Wonder.

Germany’s allies have begun to question what price Berlin is prepared to pay to deter Russia, and even its reliability as an ally, as it wavers on tough measures.

NYT
BERLIN — The United States and its NATO allies are moving to bulk up their military commitments in the Baltics and Eastern Europe as the standoff with Russia over Ukraine deepens.

Denmark is sending fighter jets to Lithuania and a frigate to the Baltic Sea. France has offered to send troops to Romania. Spain is sending a frigate to the Black Sea. President Biden has put thousands of U.S. troops on “high alert.”

And then there is Germany. In recent days Germany — Europe’s largest and richest democracy, strategically situated at the crossroads between East and West — has stood out more for what it will not do than for what it is doing.

No European country matters more to European unity and the Western alliance. But as Germany struggles to overcome its post-World War II reluctance to lead on security matters in Europe and set aside its instinct to accommodate rather than confront Russia, Europe’s most pivotal country has waffled in the first crucial test for the new government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz.

Germany’s evident hesitation to take forceful measures has fueled doubts about its reliability as an ally — reversing the dynamic with the United States in recent years — and added to concerns that Moscow could use German wavering as a wedge to divide a united European response to any Russian aggression.

President Biden held a video call with European leaders on Monday night, saying it went “very, very, very” well, and beforehand Chancellor Scholz reiterated that Russia would suffer “high costs” in case of a military intervention. But Germany’s allies have still been left to wonder what cost it is prepared to bear to confront possible Russian aggression.

The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, in Berlin this month. Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats have traditionally favored a policy of working with the Russians.

“Within the European Union Germany is crucial to achieve unity,” said Norbert Röttgen, a senior conservative lawmaker and advocate of a more muscular German foreign policy. “Putin’s goal is to split the Europeans, and then split Europe and the U.S. If the impression prevails that Germany is not fully committed to a strong NATO response, he will have succeeded in paralyzing Europe and dividing the alliance.”

As Russia held military drills near the Ukrainian border on Tuesday, Mr. Scholz met with President Emmanuel Macron of France in Berlin, warning Moscow that “a military aggression calling into question the territorial integrity of Ukraine would have grave consequences.”

But the German government has not only ruled out any arms exports to Ukraine — it is also holding up a shipment of nine Communist-era howitzers from Estonia to Ukraine.

Mr. Scholz and other senior Social Democrats in his government and party have been vague about whether shuttering the controversial Nord Stream 2 undersea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany would be part of an arsenal of possible sanctions against Russia, insisting it was a “private -sector project” and one “separate” from Ukraine.

Friedrich Merz, the designated new leader of Angela Merkel’s opposition conservative party, meanwhile, has warned against excluding Russian banks from the Swift payment transactions network, which handles global financial transfers, because it would “harm” Germany’s economic interests.

Germany’s muddled stance has been especially unsettling to Ukraine and some of Germany’s eastern neighbors. The Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, accused Berlin of effectively “encouraging” Russian aggression. Other were no less scathing.

“Berlin is making a big strategic mistake and putting its reputation at risk,” Laurynas Kasčiūnas, chairman of the national security committee of the Lithuanian Parliament told the public broadcaster LRT.

Artis Pabriks, Latvia’s defense minister, said these days German deterrence was “not sending weapons to Ukraine, but a field hospital.”

The strain in the alliance came to a head last weekend when the chief of the German Navy said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia deserved “respect” and that Crimea would “never” be returned to Ukraine. Vice Adm. Kay-Achim Schönbach, resigned, but the backlash was swift and emotional.

“This patronizing attitude subconsciously also reminds Ukrainians of the horrors of the Nazi occupation, when Ukrainians were treated as subhuman,” said Andriy Melnyk, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany.

Washington has been at pains to publicly stress its trust in Berlin, while privately lobbying Mr. Scholz to take a harder line.

President Biden sent several emissaries to Berlin. William J. Burns, head of the C.I.A., presented the chancellor with the latest intelligence on Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, who stopped in Berlin before meeting his Russian counterpart in Geneva last week, said on Sunday he had “no doubts” over Germany’s determination to stand up to Russia.

“It is telling that the U.S. has to publicly reaffirm its trust in Germany,” Jana Puglierin of the Berlin-based European Council on Foreign Relations said. “That used to be a given.”

The wrenching debate over where precisely German loyalties lie is not new. Russian-German relations have been shaped by centuries of trade and cultural exchange but also two World Wars. The Cold War added yet another layer of complexity: West Germany became firmly embedded in the Western alliance while East Germany lived under Soviet occupation.

“Why do we see Russia differently from the Americans? History,” said Matthias Platzeck, chairman of the Russian-German Forum and a former chair of Mr. Scholz’ Social Democrats. “Germany and Russia have been linked for a thousand years. The biggest Russian czarina was Catherine the Great, a German, who incidentally made Crimea part of Russia.”

“We attacked Russia twice, and the second time it was a genocidal war,” he added. “Twenty-seven million Soviets died, 15 million Russians among them.”

A brewing conflict. Antagonism between Ukraine and Russia has been simmering since 2014, when the Russian military crossed into Ukrainian territory, annexing Crimea and whipping up a rebellion in the east. A tenuous cease-fire was reached in 2015, but peace has been elusive.

A spike in hostilities. Russia has recently been building up forces near its border with Ukraine, and the Kremlin’s messaging toward its neighbor has hardened. Concern grew in late October, when Ukraine used an armed drone to attack a howitzer operated by Russian-backed separatists.

Ominous warnings. Russia called the strike a destabilizing act that violated the cease-fire agreement, raising fears of a new intervention in Ukraine that could draw the United States and Europe into a new phase of the conflict.

The Kremlin’s position. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who has increasingly portrayed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential threat to his country, said that Moscow’s military buildup was a response to Ukraine’s deepening partnership with the alliance.

Rising tension. Western countries have tried to maintain a dialogue with Moscow. But administration officials recently warned that the U.S. could throw its weight behind a Ukrainian insurgency should Russia invade.

That does not mean that Germany has failed to stand up to Russia in recent years. Germany commands a multinational NATO battle unit in Lithuania and helps monitor Baltic airspace for Russian interference. It is planning to send fighter jets to Romania next month to do the same there. (And yes, it is also sending a field hospital to Kyiv next month.)

In 2014, when Mr. Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, it was Ms. Merkel who rallied neighboring countries in East and West to back tough sanctions on Russia.

But the change of German leadership after 16 years of Ms. Merkel has put in place a government that is divided on how hard a line to draw with Russia.

Mr. Scholz’s Social Democrats have traditionally favored a policy of working with the Russians. In the 1970s, Chancellor Willy Brandt engineered the policy of rapprochement with Moscow during the Cold War, while the last Social Democratic chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, is not just a close friend of Mr. Putin (he celebrated his 70th birthday with him) but has been on the payroll of Russian energy companies since 2005.

The new Green Party foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, has been more outspoken on being tougher on Russia. But even she has drawn a line on sending German arms to Ukraine, citing “history.”

The arms-export policy in many ways embodies the modern German paradox of a nation that knows it has to assume more leadership responsibility in the world but is not quite ready to act that way.

“The idea that Germany delivers weapons that could then be used to kill Russians is very difficult to stomach for many Germans,” said Marcel Dirsus, a political analyst and nonresident fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University.

The government has been even more divided over Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline owned by Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned energy company, that many fear will hand Mr. Putin an easy way to exert influence over America’s European allies.

Russia is Europe’s main supplier of natural gas. Once Nord Stream 2 is operational, Gazprom would be able to sell additional gas to European customers without paying transit fees to Ukraine.

While Ms. Baerbock, the Green Party foreign minister, has not been shy about expressing her hostility toward the project, Ms. Merkel and Mr. Scholz have defended it on economic and energy security grounds and long ruled out using it as leverage in talks about sanctions.

It was only last week, standing next to the NATO general secretary, that the chancellor shifted his language, saying that “everything” would be on the table in case of a Russian invasion.

“Putin gave NATO a new reason to exist,” said Mr. Dirsus of the Institute for Security Policy in Kiel. “Who knows, maybe he can teach the Germans once and for all that the world has changed and they need to be prepared to pay to defend peace.”

I take it the NY Times missed the story of Germany signing on for Russian natural gas???

The sky is mostly blue with puffy white things floating around...get your NY Times here!

Bipartisanship: US House Races MASSIVE Ukraine Weapons Transfer to the Floor!

Written by daniel mcadams
Wednesday january 26, 2022

How to Retreat From Ukraine

NYT
One of the hardest challenges in geopolitics is figuring out how to conduct a successful retreat. We witnessed that reality last summer in Afghanistan, when the Biden administration made the correct strategic choice — cutting our losses instead of escalating to preserve a morally bankrupt status quo — but then staggered through a disastrous withdrawal that wounded Biden’s presidency and laid bare American incompetence to a watching world.

Now we face the same problem with Ukraine. The United States in its days as a hyperpower made a series of moves to extend our perimeter of influence deep into Russia’s near-abroad. Some of those moves appear to be sustainable: The expansion of NATO to include countries of the former Warsaw Pact was itself a risk, but at the moment those commitments seem secure. But the attempt to draw Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit, the partway-open door to Ukrainians who preferred westward-focused alliances, was a foolish overcommitment even when American power was at its height.

Note that this is not a question of what Ukrainians deserve. Russia is an authoritarian aggressor in the current crisis; Ukraine is a flawed democracy but a more decent regime than Vladimir Putin’s oligarchy. When we gave Ukraine security assurances under Bill Clinton, opened the door to NATO membership under George W. Bush and supported the Maidan protests under Barack Obama, we were in each case acting with better intentions than Moscow in its own machinations.

But in geopolitics good intentions are always downstream from the realities of power. Whatever its desires or ours, the government in Ukraine has simply never been in a position to fully join the West — it’s too economically weak, too internally divided and simply in the wrong place. And the actions of the Bush and Obama administrations — and for all of Trump’s personal sympathies for Putin, some Trump administration acts as well — have left us overstretched, our soft-power embrace of Kyiv ill-equipped to handle hard-power countermoves from Moscow.

Given those realities, and the pressing need to concentrate American power in East Asia to counter China, it’s clear enough where an ideal retreat would end up: with NATO expansion permanently tabled, with Ukraine subject to inevitable Russian pressure but neither invaded nor annexed, and with our NATO allies shouldering more of the burden of maintaining a security perimeter in Eastern Europe.

But as with Afghanistan, the actual execution is harder than the theory. Coming to a stable understanding with Putin is challenging, because he’s clearly invested in being a permanent disrupter, taking any opportunity to humiliate the West. Extricating ourselves from our Ukrainian entanglements will inevitably instill doubts about our more important commitments elsewhere, doubts that will be greater the more Kyiv suffers from our retreat. And handing off more security responsibility to the Europeans has been an unmet goal of every recent U.S. president, with the particular problem that a key European power, Germany, often acts like a de facto ally of the Russians.

Given those difficulties, the Biden administration’s wavering course has been understandable, even if the president’s recent news conference was too honest by several orders of magnitude. The United States cannot do nothing if Russia invades Ukraine; we also would be insane to join the war on Ukraine’s side. So the White House’s quest for the right in-between response, some balance of sanctions and arms shipments, looks groping and uncertain for good reason: There’s simply no perfect answer here, only a least-bad balancing of options.

But my sense is that we are still placing too much weight on the idea that only NATO gets to say who is in NATO, that simply ruling out Ukrainian membership is somehow an impossible concession. This conceit is an anachronism, an artifact of the post-Cold War moment when it briefly seemed possible that, as the historian Adam Tooze puts it, the world’s crucial boundaries “would be drawn by the Western powers, the United States and the E.U., on their own terms and to suit their own strengths and preferences.”

That’s not how the world works now, and precisely because it’s not how the world works I would be somewhat relieved — as an American citizen, not just an observer of international politics — to see our leaders acknowledge as much, rather than holding out the idea that someday we might be obliged by treaty to risk a nuclear war over the Donbas.

And if we cannot give up the idea outright, the idea of giving it up for some extensive period — like the 25 years suggested by Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon in a recent Politico op-ed — seems like a very reasonable deal to make.

Something can be reasonable and still be painful — painful as an acknowledgment of Western weakness, painful to the hopes and ambitions of Ukrainians.

But accepting some pain for the sake of a more sustainable position is simply what happens when you’ve made a generation’s worth of poor decisions, and you’re trying to find a decent and dignified way to a necessary retreat.

So you think we should go to war over Ukraine and that it would be a good idea? No F'ing way you will convince me we should, given the current situation.

Isn't it patently obvious? Putin wants to rebuild a buffer between Russia and the West. He won't be able to rebuild the entire USSR but he will take what he can get.

Posts are getting longer. Now we are quoting those longer posts in their entirety. Maybe someone could toss in a dissertation, or perhaps a doctoral thesis. Let's really test the character limits up in this fugga. Imma continue to slip into permanent terms & conditions mode

Not a personal attack towards any participants Y'all do whatever feeds your passion. Just an observation and mild self reflection

****ushima, I think...

Or is this what you are asking about? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_in_France#Accidents_and_incidents

The current situation should not give anyone a warm, fuzzy feeling.

You have the same clowns driving the bus that over saw the botched Iraq withdrawal that gave birth to the "B Team" and these same clowns orchestrated the Afghanistan withdrawal disaster.

These two events could be a clue as to the out come for the U.S.

I'll take that look. Your rigidity is charming.

Add to that the Germans have also upped the use of coal to keep a baseline grid of energy up.
Kill the nuclear to make it easier for the Russians to manipulate the Germans, while they up coal us for…. The good of the environment.

Would be a story I would think I’d find in The Onion.

I think at a governmental level continuous insults are counterproductive. Truthfully so is our behavior here. Of course some here revel in that. I have been to prone to act that way. I have tried to decrease that behavior. Certain individuals make that difficult because of their rhetoric. Perhaps I can do better at laying out articles/points that are pertinent to the discussion and stop my arguing. Frank does this rather well, though he is a better man than I.

Have at, that there is a lot of information that one can make many jokes about, many snide comments about, or many hurtful remarks about. So to speak a litmus test of what I just stated.