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| Impressive, or what? |
So what does Li'l Volodya don for his expedition to a safe corner of Kursk? Yep, the khaki hi-neck teeshirt and fatigues. (At least he kept his top on.) Is he trying to channel anyone that Trump might have met recently? Why?!
The really funny thing is that the video clips and stills of his soldier-boy "visit to the front" shown on Russian TV were of poor quality. Instead of ignoring this glitch, or even revelling in the cinéma vérité realism of the situation Putin, ever one for a carefully curated image in the style he feels is appropriate for his status as co-equal of Trump and Xi, had his spokesman bluster defensively about it in a press conference. Do they not realise it makes them look even more phoney?
Let's see how Putin's "Yes but No" response to a ceasefire goes down with Trump. The Donald will certainly want someone to blame if his "fighting stops within 100 days" boast doesn't come about.
ND
13 comments:
Russia is winning. They have trapped a large chunk of some of the best Ukrainian forces in the Kursk pocket. Why on Earth would they agree to a ceasefire that would allow the Ukrainians to rescue those troops, reorganise and re-arm? This is just more theatre to paint Russia as the villain.
Look at the map. It isn't a pocket.
Wildgoose - my understanding, admittedly based on pro RF Telegram, is that some of the best Ukr troops were withdrawn a week or so ago. Either way it seems the Kursk incursion is effectively over.
Great admirer of NDs work, but this Lil Volodya stuff is just going through the (scripted) motions. He'll be talking about the "full scale invasion" or telling us Tommy Robinson's real name in a minute ;-)
Back on the capitalism topic, I see GDP fell in January despite the millions of new Britons arriving in the last few years. We are rapidly approaching the time when TTK will have to raise the Russian threat to full-boost vertical, and Rachel from accounts will have to say that improved living standards will have to wait a decade or three because of that nasty Putin.
"Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer-except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs. Perhaps this was partly because there were so many pigs and so many dogs. It was not that these creatures did not work, after their fashion. There was, as Squealer was never tired of explaining, endless work in the supervision and organisation of the farm. Much of this work was of a kind that the other animals were too ignorant to understand."
If Putin didn't exist he would have to be invented ....
They’ve been winning for three years. When, if you’d care to speculate, is Russia actually going to win<\i>?
And, while we’re on the subject, what exactly does “won” look like?
It seems the man who organised the burning of the Trades Union building in Odessa (with pro-Russia Odessans inside it), Demyan Ganul, has been shot dead - by a lieutenant of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
I must say it makes me cringe to hear TTK saying "Russia must do X". The only thing that's worse is to hear Boris saying it, but the BBC don't give him front page any more. Max Hastings was spot on about him.
Apparently Zelensky's requirements for a ceasefire are pretty much as before, no loss of territory etc, so saying "ball in Russia's court" is pretty disingenuous and the only way we'll get an agreement in the next six months is with more dead Ukrainians and Russians. But maybe no Ukrainian will step up to the plate, and it'll go on and on ...
Maybe the reason the EU/UK elites are so hardline is that they are deep in the doo-doo through following US foreign policy slavishly for so long, including both provoking Russia (ever eastward NATO) and ignoring huge hits on them by the US (NS2), so that they now, in the post-Trump world, have only two possible policy choices (the third, saying “let’s be friends with Russia”, rapidly leading to arrest and potentially imprisonment – see Romania for details):
a) try and persuade the Donald that the only desire is to “Make Europe Great Again” and please please please stop the tariffs. Trouble is their elites have been slagging him off for so long now that your average Guardian commenter wouldn’t stand for it – or at least it would be a VERY hard sell, and always at the mercy of some minister, perhaps jockeying for personal position, saying “F*** Trump and all his works”.
b) and most likely, go all out on “the Russian threat”, and explain to their increasingly impoverished populations that the increased living standards they were promised at election time will sadly have to be put back a few years (read “decades” or “never”), because WE MUST REARM.
Not only that, but the threat is so great that many a sacred ox like healthcare, pensions or benefits must be gored.
Yeah, if only people weren’t so stupid and so hopelessly in the thrall of and a slave to what they happen to have just read or got told about, they’d learn to think Russia akin to the cuddly toy on the Generation Game conveyor belt of geopolitics.
Incidentally, though, why not simply put your great inspirational treatises in front of them and — being the sheep-like creatures that they are — they’d be immediately swayed and come round to your infallibility and conclusions in an instant?
Be fair Clive, Starmer wouldn't by any means be the first leader to look to a militant policy abroad as distraction / compensation for a domestic scene that's not going too well.
And there's no doubt that our education system of the last 40 years has primed Britons to always be against The New Hitler, whoever he is this year (I'm old enough to remember Nasser of Egypt in that role).
Our young people may be a bit vague about "there's" and "theirs", or be unable to find Sudan on a map, but they've all learned "the lessons of Munich".
Uk military spending 1960-1970 is around 6%
1970-1980 around 4.8 to 5%. Including the crisis years of opec and unions etc.
1980-1990 4.5 to 5%. Tapering down rapidly once it’s clear communism is finished.
1990-2000 settles in at 2.5%. But of an increase for Iraq and other wars. 2.5% is the new ‘ peace’ level.
2000-2010. Very similar. Mostly 2.5% gdp for defence.
2010-2020 heads into 2.2% territory for average.
So. GDP at 5% is pretty much a UK historical norm, for a post ww2 era. Only sinking below once it was clear it the USSR was rusting away on its own.
No one is suggesting 5% as a reality. They are suggesting 3% to 3.5%.
Putting defence spending to an era of no imminent threat, but very troublesome and unfriendly powers around.
Seems reasonable. If Russia and China need containing in their own sphere. Cold War style.
UK GDP is c. £2.8tn. Rising defence spending from current levels to 3-3.5% requires a c. 1% rise, or in cash terms, £28bn per year.
HS2 has so far consumed about £30bn give or take, and will consume at least three times that before its finished (last estimate was £80bn, if it costs less than £100bn before the first choo choo runs end to end I'll eat my hat). I therefore conclude that cancelling HS2 will get us 2 maybe 3 years of extra defence spending straight off the bat, without having to touch other spending or taxes.
Whats not to like?
I remember fifteen years ago Medvedev was considered a moderate.
https://x.com/MedvedevRussiaE/status/1900633360852283414
"UK updates Trump: Russia should accept the proposal for a ceasefire in Ukraine without any conditions, says the British Foreign Secretary. Britain and its minister can shove their idea back up the sh*thole it came from, diplomatically speaking."
Portillo was on some politics show today, and when the interviewer mentioned TTK "putting pressure on Putin" he burst out laughing.
TTK's Coalition Of The Willing was a fantasy, he said. "Ukraine have around a million in arms, to offer ten thousand is almost an insult. And what chance do you think there is of Putin agreeing to a NATO army in Ukraine?"
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