Vocal Voices

Interesting website, Flightradar24.

Looking at the Ukraine just now, there's four or five Ryanair and other flights going into and out of Kyiv.

And a single aircraft at 51,000 feet, high over Donetsk Region.

According to Flightradar, one of these .......
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_ ... lobal_Hawk

I don't know what to believe.
On the one hand Russia does not scruples to murder its dissidents abroad. On the other NATO is supposed to be a defensive alliance that is instead aggressively advancing towards Russia's border.

I can't make it out either

I still think that Russia wants back, as it sees it, the lands it bought as settlement of the Russia-Polish war pacts in the the late 1680s to 1720s. The line ran from the Crimea up the Dnieper then to the border between Kharkiv and Luhansk. The place name endings in that region of 'pol' and 'sk', tell a story like those in the UK ending 'by' or 'cester' indicating they were Viking or Roman settlements, and the regions are all of majority Russian ethnicity. The whole region was annexed to the UkrSSR from the RusSSR by Khrushchev, a Ukrainian, in 1954 when he became president of the USSR.

Then came the fall of the Soviet Union and 'unfinished business'.

If Putin does take control he might offer a treaty to go no further on condition that the rump Ukraine is never allowed to join NATO. It might work.

It might already have begun.

Russia has sent a flotilla of warships through the narrow Strait of Kerch into the Sea of Azov, which separates it from the Black Sea, and issued a NOTAM (Notice to airmen) not to overly the region. Ukraine has a 280 km coastline on Azov but about half of it, including the port of Mariupol, is in the hands of Russian separatists.

Russia now effectively controls the land inside the external eastern Ukraine border from the Crimea round to just below Kharkiv.

Putin has just announced on TV to the Russian people that the Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine are recognised as independent. He could persuade others - Zaporizhzhia, maybe Kherson. Who knows?

Recognised by Russia as independent.

NATO could play at that game too but they don't tend to. He is playing a careful game here. The last time the sanctions were severe and caused a recession in Russia. This time I think their neighbours are far more on the hook for oil and gas. He may get away with it.

It's a very strange situation to me
Putin is very clever very sly as Well
What I found strange all those people getting on train's with just a bag? Now if that was me I would need to take more than a bag in fact the sink as Well
I'm not very political just practical

The bombardment has begun but, as far as we know, the land invasion has not yet.

It seems to be military targets so far, probably precluding a land invasion.

Time enough to see where Putin stops.

He's probably going to see a recession now. Perhaps this will finally force the Western European countries away from Russian gas dependency??

Well that's a theory Suff but giving up Russian gas must be some way down the road.
Germany has committed to shutting down all of it's nuclear reactors and to getting rid of all it's coal fired power stations by 2030.
So unless they manage to go entirely renewable by then (and I reckon they can't), then all Putin has to do is to turn the gas tap off tomorrow and that's most of Europe stuffed.