Opinion International Geopolitics

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Papa G said:
Lol. Russia and Sweden haven't been at war since 1809 which ended in the creation of Finland. The chances of Russia invading Sweden are exactly zero. Clearly European Union/ American incentives were heavily involved.
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"Clearly" Russian incentives were heavily involved.
www.bbc.com

How Sweden and Finland went from neutral to Nato

Russia has threatened to retaliate, but Sweden is now set to join Finland as the 32nd Nato member.
www.bbc.com www.bbc.com
Sweden's military weakness came into full view in 2013 when Russian bomber planes were able to simulate an attack on Stockholm and Sweden needed Nato help to ward them off.

In 2014, Swedes were transfixed by reports that a Russian submarine was lurking in the shallow waters of the Stockholm archipelago.

In 2018, every household received army pamphlets titled "if crisis or war comes" - the first time they were sent out since 1991.
 
One of Putin's excuses for invading Ukraine was that NATO enlargement made Russia insecure. Thanks to him Russia is (will be) even more insecure.
Kosovo also aspires to join NATO. Joining the alliance is a debate topic in several other European countries outside the alliance, including Austria, Cyprus, Ireland, Malta, Moldova.
 
Ukraine is a former Soviet Slavic Eastern Europe state that the US and and Western Europe don't really give a flying fcuk about. Sweden is a completely different story. It's a Western democracy and the home of ABBA. Any attack on Sweden would trigger WW3.
 

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Papa G said:
It's a Western democracy and the home of ABBA. Any attack on Sweden would trigger WW3.
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Haha ABBA has a few War songs, so I guess that has to be defended.

Waterloo
Fernando - The Swedish version is about lost love, but the English version is about 2 old freedom fighters from the Mexican revolution
Soldiers - never released as a single, was on and album, but is an anti war / what can we once war is declared, song
 
New York Times have detailed in a long Sunday article the CIA's involvement with Ukraine defence forces. Here is about 20% of it.

www.nytimes.com

The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin

For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com

Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war.
But that is above ground.

Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov.
The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months after Russia’s invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine’s military.

There is also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the C.I.A.

“One hundred and ten percent,” Gen. Serhii Dvoretskiy, a top intelligence commander, said in an interview at the base.
Now entering the third year of a war that has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, the intelligence partnership between Washington and Kyiv is a linchpin of Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. The C.I.A. and other American intelligence agencies provide intelligence for targeted missile strikes, track Russian troop movements and help support spy networks.

But the partnership is no wartime creation, nor is Ukraine the only beneficiary.

It took root a decade ago, coming together in fits and starts under three very different U.S. presidents, pushed forward by key individuals who often took daring risks. It has transformed Ukraine, whose intelligence agencies were long seen as thoroughly compromised by Russia, into one of Washington’s most important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.

The listening post in the Ukrainian forest is part of a C.I.A.-supported network of spy bases constructed in the past eight years that includes 12 secret locations along the Russian border. Before the war, the Ukrainians proved themselves to the Americans by collecting intercepts that helped prove Russia’s involvement in the 2014 downing of a commercial jetliner, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The Ukrainians also helped the Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Around 2016, the C.I.A. began training an elite Ukrainian commando force — known as Unit 2245 — which captured Russian drones and communications gear so that C.I.A. technicians could reverse-engineer them and crack Moscow’s encryption systems. (One officer in the unit was Kyrylo Budanov, now the general leading Ukraine’s military intelligence.)
And the C.I.A. also helped train a new generation of Ukrainian spies who operated inside Russia, across Europe, and in Cuba and other places where the Russians have a large presence.

The relationship is so ingrained that C.I.A. officers remained at a remote location in western Ukraine when the Biden administration evacuated U.S. personnel in the weeks before Russia invaded in February 2022. During the invasion, the officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use.
“Without them, there would have been no way for us to resist the Russians, or to beat them,” said Ivan Bakanov, who was then head of Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency, the S.B.U.

The details of this intelligence partnership, many of which are being disclosed by The New York Times for the first time, have been a closely guarded secret for a decade.

In more than 200 interviews, current and former officials in Ukraine, the United States and Europe described a partnership that nearly foundered from mutual distrust before it steadily expanded, turning Ukraine into an intelligence-gathering hub that intercepted more Russian communications than the C.I.A. station in Kyiv could initially handle. Many of the officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence and matters of sensitive diplomacy.
Now these intelligence networks are more important than ever, as Russia is on the offensive and Ukraine is more dependent on sabotage and long-range missile strikes that require spies far behind enemy lines. And they are increasingly at risk: If Republicans in Congress end military funding to Kyiv, the C.I.A. may have to scale back.

To try to reassure Ukrainian leaders, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director, made a secret visit to Ukraine last Thursday, his 10th visit since the invasion.

From the outset, a shared adversary — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia — brought the C.I.A. and its Ukrainian partners together. Obsessed with “losing” Ukraine to the West, Mr. Putin had regularly interfered in Ukraine’s political system, handpicking leaders he believed would keep Ukraine within Russia’s orbit, yet each time it backfired, driving protesters into the streets.
Mr. Putin has long blamed Western intelligence agencies for manipulating Kyiv and sowing anti-Russia sentiment in Ukraine.
Toward the end of 2021, according to a senior European official, Mr. Putin was weighing whether to launch his full-scale invasion when he met with the head of one of Russia’s main spy services, who told him that the C.I.A., together with Britain’s MI6, were controlling Ukraine and turning it into a beachhead for operations against Moscow.

But the Times investigation found that Mr. Putin and his advisers misread a critical dynamic. The C.I.A. didn’t push its way into Ukraine. U.S. officials were often reluctant to fully engage, fearing that Ukrainian officials could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.

........................................
 
OneGreatClub said:
Oh boy 🤣🤣🤣
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If you think that's amusing, here's the context...


Former US president Donald Trump has warned Prince Harry he won’t protect him from deportation from the country if he is reelected in November.

Trump said the Duke of Sussex's actions were an "unforgivable" betrayal to the late Queen.

The presidential candidate also took aim at Joe Biden’s administration for being “too gracious” to the Sussexes when they moved to the US in 2020.
 
OneGreatClub said:
Murky stuff

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Who is this Jeni Farnsworth? Some absolute nobody, no doubt. Goes to check her Twitter profile. Yep. A nobody.

Why the **** would Putin want to use Hunter Biden's appointment to Burisma to 'control Ukrainian gas'? He had Rosneft who owns 95% of TNK-BP for that - they already controlled Ukrainian gas.

www.afr.com

Oligarchs, power and profits: BP’s wild ride in Russia

The oil major’s journey in Russia is about more than corporate history: it’s also the story of the West’s urgent courtship of Russian business and how it all went wrong.
www.afr.com www.afr.com

In 2013, Putin got what he wanted. BP completed a complex deal in which it received $12 billion in cash and 18.5 per cent of Rosneft in return for its half of TNK-BP.

Fast forward to the beginning of the Ukraine war:

The board reconvened on Sunday and chairman Helge Lund announced BP’s exit hours later. In three days BP had decided to pull the plug on three decades of business, in a move that could cost the energy major up to $US25 billion ($33 billion).

Now, if you do a deep dive into TNK-BP, you'll see that they own licenses to drill for shale oil in the Donbas region.

Now go back to this story from 2015:

Russia's silent shale gas victory in Ukraine

The vast shale gas reserves in the separatist-held Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Lugansk regions are an important element not to be overlooked when analysing the Ukraine crisis, writes Szilvia Batkov.
www.euractiv.com www.euractiv.com

"However, by taking a deeper look it turns out that Ukraine – one of the few European countries that has not banned fracking – is presumed to have Europe’s third-largest shale gas reserves at 1.2 trillion cubic metres.

Yuzivska is believed to contain up to four trillion cubic meters of shale gas, according to the Ukrainian government. To tap this, energy giant Shell signed a production sharing agreement in January 2013, opening way for a potential $10 billion investment in the field."

But here's the big kicker

"“The second oil and gas region is located in the west of the country, close to the Ukrainian western border. In terms of unconventional gas potential – according to some national estimates – I would say that about 60-70% of the reserves are located in the east of the country – in the Donetsk-Dnipro basin, as it is called. In other words, the major areas of unconventional oil and gas potential are located close to the war zone in the east and, specifically, the Yuzivska licence area, which Shell had planned to develop, is located in that region. That was to reason Shell decided to postpone the work on the project, and to declare force majeure”, he said in an interview.

At first, the withdrawal of Shell and Exxon seemed to be strictly Ukraine’s problem. However, if we zoom out and look at Europe’s energy map, the case is quite different. Besides Russia, the future of Ukraine’s shale gas -if confirmed- could be of enormous importance for both the European Union and the US. In addition to its own independence, Ukraine also had ambitious plans to become an exporter of shale gas to Europe – with the active contribution of the America and its business interests."

“The question of Ukraine is a question of EU’s future, EU’s safety, and a correction of EU’s energy policy. We will not be able to efficiently fend off potential aggressive steps by Russia in the future, if so many European countries are dependent on Russian gas deliveries or wade into such dependence,” the then Prime Minister of Poland Donald Tusk said back in 2012.

Now do you understand why Hunter Biden was on the board of Burisma, who had licenses to conduct fracking operations in the Donbas region? And why Putin invaded Ukraine? Russia doesn't give two flying ****s about NATO, because Putin knows that if he can control oil specifically natural gas, the transition to renewable energy across the EU will become prohibitively expensive and he can dictate policy that way.

You might also get some sort of level of understanding as to why Ukraine - who had plans to use fracking to become a global energy leader - and the EU in general hates Trump, who loosened regulations for fracking in the US in 2016 and made the US a global energy leader.

www.nytimes.com

Driven by Trump Policy Changes, Fracking Booms on Public Lands (Published 2018)

The administration is auctioning off millions of acres of drilling rights and rolling back regulations, raising environmental concerns in states like Wyoming.
www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
 

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OneGreatClub said:
The House GOP is totally dysfunctional, the SCOTUS has been captured by Trump and the far right, and Trump wants to be king forever and allow his hero, Putin, to annihilate Ukrainians from the farce of the earth.
Anyone who believes otherwise is naive.
What a time to be alive.
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You're an idiot.
 
Jason K said:
On the rare occasion she posts an original thought that isn't just re-tweeting the most extreme left wing tweets she can find, this is what she comes up with.
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LOL. Irony ain't your strong point is it?

This was your previous post FFS - a lamearse cut and paste from elsewhere in the absence of an original thought.

1709291364326.png
 
Festerz said:
Glorious. We need more politicians in the world like this this - articulate, intelligent and calling out the partisan media for their sheer idiocy. The dimwit interviewer had nothing to come back with.

Loved the 'f@g-end' comment most.
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Guardian story here worth a read...
 
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Grave Danger said:
Guardian story here worth a read...
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page won't load GD but I assume this is the one?

www.theguardian.com

George Galloway: constituency-hopping campaigner who is rarely far from controversy

With Rochdale win, Galloway has been elected to represent voters in four cities for three parties across four decades
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com

Knew nothing about him but he seems quite a 'campaigner'. An outlier that I'm glad to watch from afar tbh.

The full sky interview is here. The slight Irish lilt is what makes it work.

 
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