Russia Discussion

MOSCOW (Reuters) - More than 100 Russian soldiers were killed in eastern Ukraine in a battle this month while helping pro-Russian separatists fight Ukrainian troops, two members of the Russian presidential human rights council said on Thursday, citing accounts of eye-witness and relatives of the dead.

Ella Polyakova and Sergei Krivenko, both members of the council, said around 300 people were also injured in the violence on Aug. 13 near the town of Snizhnye in Donetsk Province, when a column of trucks full of ammunition they were driving was hit by a sustained volley of Grad missiles.

"A column of Russian soldiers was attacked by Grad rockets and more 100 people died. It all happened in the city of Snizhnye in Donetsk Province," said Krivenko speaking by telephone. Polyakova said she had also been given the same figure, of more than 100, for the number of Russian soldiers killed in the attack.
Click to expand...

Ella and Sergei might end up dying in an elevator on the way up to their apartments after giving away that information.
 
sun_tzu said:
Well I'm not sure it's full on considering how many troops and tanks they could throw in there...
But certainly things do seem to have escalated and I can see things getting a lot worse very quickly
Click to expand...

Its full on in that there are actual Russian troops fighting Ukrainian forces inside Ukraine as opposed to just Russian separatist proxies doing Putin's dirty work to shield him from broader international criticism.
 
Raoul said:
Its full on in that there are actual Russian troops fighting Ukrainian forces inside Ukraine as opposed to just Russian separatist proxies doing Putin's dirty work to shield him from broader international criticism.
Click to expand...
Technically they are suspected Russian troops (like in the chrimea) as the insignia have been removed and Russia is denying they are Russian.
Or if you believe the separatists spokesperson they are Russian troops on holiday and not there on orders.
I don't believe the spokesman for either Russia or the separatists for one second but if Russia had decided on a full on invasion they would be in Kiev by now
 
Raoul said:
Its full on in that there are actual Russian troops fighting Ukrainian forces inside Ukraine as opposed to just Russian separatist proxies doing Putin's dirty work to shield him from broader international criticism.
Click to expand...
I don't think Putin is too fussed about broader Western criticism.

sun_tzu said:
Technically they are suspected Russian troops (like in the chrimea) as the insignia have been removed and Russia is denying they are Russian.
Or if you believe the separatists spokesperson they are Russian troops on holiday and not there on orders.
I don't believe the spokesman for either Russia or the separatists for one second but if Russia had decided on a full on invasion they would be in Kiev by now
Click to expand...
Exactly. A handful of insignia-less soldiers is hardly a full blown effort. But, whatever floats some posters's boat.

If it was full blown they'd be in Berlin by now. Just like in World War 2.
 
Essaux said:
I don't think Putin is too fussed about broader Western criticism.
Click to expand...

He will be once public opinion turns on him. He has been leading a double lie on Ukraine - lying to his domestic public about fascism in Ukraine, which has raised public expectations for an invasion, and blatantly lying to the likes of Merkel and other leaders about not being in Ukraine in the first place. If he doesn't annex parts of eastern Ukraine, he will be viewed as a failure inside Russia, and will have to deal with a public already pissed about the Russian economy going into recession as a direct result of his actions.
 
sun_tzu said:
Technically they are suspected Russian troops (like in the chrimea) as the insignia have been removed and Russia is denying they are Russian.
Or if you believe the separatists spokesperson they are Russian troops on holiday and not there on orders.
I don't believe the spokesman for either Russia or the separatists for one second but if Russia had decided on a full on invasion they would be in Kiev by now
Click to expand...

I'm not talking about every Russian tank, troop, and artillery being dedicated to invading Ukraine - but rather a full on Russian invasion of Ukrainian territory (which first happened in Crimea) and is now happening in the east. We're not talking about a traditional war where things are admitted - this is a proxy war of double speak, propaganda, and lies where the Russians are pouring resources into eastern Ukraine, whilst denying they are doing so to shield themselves from international scorn.
 
It's difficult to see how Putin will save face on this, I'm sure the rebels shooting down a commercial airliner with russian weapons wasn't in the plan, and backing out will be embarrassing to his domestic audience.
 
Essaux said:
Wow, did you just say that? Wow, what a lie.

It has not been democratically elected. It has been established by a coup d'etat. Ousting the pro-Russian government under Yanukovych, who was democratically elected.
Click to expand...

The same Parliament is sitting from the 2012 election. Democratically elected? Check.

There were Presidential elections held in May 2014 with 60% turnout. Democratically elected? Check.
 
Chorley1974 said:
It's difficult to see how Putin will save face on this, I'm sure the rebels shooting down a commercial airliner with russian weapons wasn't in the plan, and backing out will be embarrassing to his domestic audience.
Click to expand...

Agreed. He has been intensely propagandizing Russian citizens through 24/7 blanket TV coverage about "fascists" taking over Ukraine, which has created a climate where the Russian public, particularly the ultra-nationalists, will demand some form of glory, which he now has to manufacture lest be considered a complete failure.
 
Raoul said:
Agreed. He has been intensely propagandizing Russian citizens through 24/7 blanket TV coverage about "fascists" taking over Ukraine, which has created a climate where the Russian public, particularly the ultra-nationalists, will demand some form of glory, which he now has to manufacture lest be considered a complete failure.
Click to expand...

But if he did take over half of ukraine (which with a few thousand more troops he may well do) then held an election like in chrimea there cant be any serious possibility of nato the states europe or the UN sending in troops (other than to stop further incursions into west ukraine). Yes there would be more sanctions and no doubt airspace would be closed to european / american carriers over russia and there would be other tit for tat economic / political games played - but ultimatley he would have annexed half of ukraine (and most of the gas fields) and we will do nothing about it.

That would probably qualify as a win for Putin wouldn't it?

Certainly if not glory not complete failure
 
ew2j2Tgso_I.jpg
 
sun_tzu said:
But if he did take over half of ukraine (which with a few thousand more troops he may well do) then held an election like in chrimea there cant be any serious possibility of nato the states europe or the UN sending in troops (other than to stop further incursions into west ukraine). Yes there would be more sanctions and no doubt airspace would be closed to european / american carriers over russia and there would be other tit for tat economic / political games played - but ultimatley he would have annexed half of ukraine (and most of the gas fields) and we will do nothing about it.

That would probably qualify as a win for Putin wouldn't it?

Certainly if not glory not complete failure
Click to expand...


First it wouldn't be half of Ukraine, probably a third of it if we were to include additional areas of like Kherson, which is unlikely. Second, it would result in a complete implosion of the Russian economy to where any positive sentiment he gained from invading Ukraine would be wiped out once the economy goes into a deep recession, and indeed it looks as though Europe and the US are considering additional sanctions as we speak.
 
On Russian troops in Ukraine, honesty is not everyone's best policy

(Reuters) - The Ukraine conflict has evoked many memories of the Cold War, including a footloose attitude to the truth. But even as Russia’s denials of involvement stretch credibility to breaking point, for some they remain a convenient fiction.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is chief among them; denying a Russian role will keep his domestic audience in ignorance of a war they don't want - especially useful if the battle goes badly.

But there are also some European powers, including Germany and France, who despite being on the opposite side of the crisis share Putin's desire not to paint it as an out-and-out war between Russia and Ukraine.

For them, stating unequivocally that Russia has attacked Ukraine would force them to impose more costly sanctions, and could block the path to a truce with Russia they hope will resolve the crisis.

Some say the evidence of Russian involvement has built to a point where it now strains credibility to assert that Russia's military is not helping the rebels in eastern Ukraine.

That is especially so after the past 72 hours when, according to Kiev, Russia has pushed in troops and hardware to avoid a collapse of its pro-Moscow separatist allies.

"The mask is coming off," said Samantha Power, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. "In these acts, these recent acts, we see Russia's actions for what they are: a deliberate effort to support, and now fight alongside, illegal separatists in another sovereign country."

NATO has released satellite imagery it said showed Russian combat forces inside Ukrainian territory. A group of captured servicemen from Russia were recorded on video describing how they were ordered into Ukraine, though officials in Moscow said they crossed the border by mistake.

A Reuters reporter saw armored vehicles and uniformed men, all with identifying markings removed or covered up, massing on the Russian side of the border with Ukraine. They were a short drive from the Ukrainian village where residents reported seeing identical troops manning checkpoints.

In the northwest Russian city of Pskov, reporters were chased away from a cemetery where, according to accounts on social media, two Russian paratroopers killed in Ukraine were secretly buried.

Two members of a Russian presidential human rights council said they had evidence that more than 100 Russian servicemen were killed in a single battle in Ukraine this month.



TRAUMA OF WAR

Russia continues to deny that its troops or military equipment have attacked Ukraine. The defense ministry dismissed the assertions as a "canard" invented by foreigners.

The Kremlin knows that an all-out war would threaten Putin's popularity after an Aug. 26 opinion poll by Russia's Public Opinion Foundation showed only 5 percent of respondents favored sending in Russian troops to eastern Ukraine.

The same poll showed the majority of Russians receive their information on the conflict from television -- which is almost entirely state-controlled and makes no mention of Russian troops fighting in Ukraine -- and that 73 percent believe the information they get from the media is reliable.

Putin only acknowledged that Russian troops had occupied Ukraine's Crimea Peninsula earlier this year after it became clear Kiev would not fight back against Moscow's annexation.

"Nobody judges the winners," said Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst who is often critical of Putin.

Eastern Ukraine, in contrast, will be a tough fight, with the outcome uncertain.

If the Kremlin were to let the broader Russian public know its soldiers were fighting in Ukraine, that could unearth traumatic memories of past conflicts.

Memories are still raw of the long, drawn-out fight against separatists in the Russian region of Chechnya, and before that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the telegrams telling families that their sons had died in those campaigns.

Those conflicts also spawned an organized network of campaign groups called soldiers' mothers committees which -- even as the rest of civil society has been squeezed by the Kremlin -- still enjoy moral authority and political influence.

That network has already swung into action, collating information from parents who said their soldier sons had gone missing, possibly in Ukraine.

"We are a small movement but a morally strong one," Ella Polyakova, who heads the St. Petersburg Soldiers' Mothers Committee, told Reuters. She also sits on the presidential human rights council.

Putin can skirt the domestic political risks of waging a war by denying that it is happening for as long as he can.

"If it's an all-out war against Ukraine, people's minds would turn around much more quickly," said Oreshkin. "That would be dangerous for Putin."

Acknowledging that Russia is involved would also undermine the Kremlin's efforts to make Kiev recognize the separatists as a legitimate domestic phenomenon that must be accommodated in an eventual political settlement.



EUROPEAN NUANCE

While the United States, the leadership of the NATO military alliance, and more hawkish European countries such as Britain and Poland say unequivocally that Russian troops are fighting in Ukraine, some European leaders have been more cautious.

French President Francois Hollande said that for Russian troops to have entered Ukrainian territory would be "intolerable and unacceptable", but added the qualification that this had not yet been proven to be true.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel referred to "reports of an increased presence of Russian soldiers" in Ukraine, without saying that they were on the ground there.

According to one senior European diplomat, Berlin believes that, at some point in the future, a deal can be brokered with Russia and so does not want to take steps that would unnecessarily antagonize it.

In the case of France, accusing Moscow of invading Ukraine could jeopardize a deal to sell a Mistral warship to the Russian navy, which in turn could have an effect on future defense contracts with other customers, according to Francois Heisbourg, chairman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Paris.

"Of the major countries, I assume France would be the last one to state the obvious," said Heisbourg.

"They have a stake in denying this for as long as they can and only changing their mind when the evidence is completely unambiguous. Don't expect the French to signal the beginning of the stampede."

If Russia openly waged war on Ukraine, it would be harder for European states such as France and Germany to maintain their nuanced line on Russia, and make tougher European Union sanctions inevitable.

This factor, along with the domestic risks, gives Putin an additional reason to maintain his line that Russian troops are not fighting in Ukraine.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/29/us-ukraine-crisis-russia-denial-idUSKBN0GT1DY20140829
Click to expand...

What a bunch of rubes. For comparison: http://www.gallup.com/poll/171740/americans-confidence-news-media-remains-low.aspx
 
Merkels comments are interesting because she refers to it as reports of an increased presence which to me sounds like she is saying that some Russian troops have been in the Ukraine for some time now.
 
JustAFan said:
Merkels comments are interesting because she refers to it as reports of an increased presence which to me sounds like she is saying that some Russian troops have been in the Ukraine for some time now.
Click to expand...

At some point she's going to snap after finally recognizing that her chummy phone calls with Putin in German are merely attempts at him bullshitting her to delay more severe sanctions. That point may come within days.
 
Raoul said:
At some point she's going to snap after finally recognizing that her chummy phone calls with Putin in German are merely attempts at him bullshitting her to delay more severe sanctions. That point may come within days.
Click to expand...

We are definitely getting to the point where diplomatic euphemisms are no longer valid. The million dollar question is how much does the EU (particularly Germany) ultimately care about Ukraine. In terms of realpolitik, the EU can't really afford to "adopt" it. Russia can even less afford it but there are no meaningful elections in Russia to worry Putin (until Russians start to realise the money is running out and the tsar is wearing no clothes). Very dangerous times. Common sense (rather than right or wrong) suggests a deal with a an east and south autonomous and under Russian influence. Not a great solution but the best the West has had since the second half of the 17th century.
 
MoskvaRed said:
We are definitely getting to the point where diplomatic euphemisms are no longer valid. The million dollar question is how much does the EU (particularly Germany) ultimately care about Ukraine. In terms of realpolitik, the EU can't really afford to "adopt" it. Russia can even less afford it but there are no meaningful elections in Russia to worry Putin (until Russians start to realise the money is running out and the tsar is wearing no clothes). Very dangerous times. Common sense (rather than right or wrong) suggests a deal with a an east and south autonomous and under Russian influence. Not a great solution but the best the West has had since the second half of the 17th century.
Click to expand...

From what I've seen the polls in all of Ukraine, including the east and south do not favor becoming Russian (despite having mostly Russian speakers). More broadly, from a European and US perspective, Ukraine isn't particularly important. What is important and incredibly destabilizing is whether Putin's Russia can be viewed as a trustworthy political and economic partner. Putin has crossed the Rubicon of authoritarianism over the past few years to where he can't leave his position, because if he did, he would be incredibly vulnerable to prosecution. So his only option is tighter authoritarianism and popularity through foreign conquest. That is imo what the west fears, and is particularly disappointing after Putin framed himself as collaborative actor for the past 15 years. The only reason this has not escalated more is because of Obama and his passive aggressive sanctions-oriented approach. If a Republican was in office, war may be on the horizon, and it may yet be.
 
I love this thread. It's like watching 95% Fox News and 5% CNN. Such balanced perspectives.

You'd think the world was black and white or something.
 
Nucks said:
I love this thread. It's like watching 95% Fox News and 5% CNN. Such balanced perspectives.

You'd think the world was black and white or something.
Click to expand...

Or more appropriately 80% CNN 20% RT.
 
Raoul said:
From what I've seen the polls in all of Ukraine, including the east and south do not favor becoming Russian (despite having mostly Russian speakers). More broadly, from a European and US perspective, Ukraine isn't particularly important. What is important and incredibly destabilizing is whether Putin's Russia can be viewed as a trustworthy political and economic partner. Putin has crossed the Rubicon of authoritarianism over the past few years to where he can't leave his position, because if he did, he would be incredibly vulnerable to prosecution. So his only option is tighter authoritarianism and popularity through foreign conquest. That is imo what the west fears, and is particularly disappointing after Putin framed himself as collaborative actor for the past 15 years. The only reason this has not escalated more is because of Obama and his passive aggressive sanctions-oriented approach. If a Republican was in office, war may be on the horizon, and it may yet be.
Click to expand...

As to whether he can be trusted, the answer is obviously no. And, based on current trends, Russia will become increasingly nationalistic. The question ultimately is whether we draw the line in the sand at the Don or further west towards the Dnipro. That doesn't answer answer what Eastern Ukrainians may want but writing off the east of the country may be the most practical solution with the firm message that any incursions further west means NATO troops on the ground.
 
A very interesting video to watch, especially for those who think that the USA never have any bad intentions when meddling in yet another place around the world. And that there aren't hidden motives in certain actions. And that Western media aren't thoroughly biased and de facto propaganda channels as well as Russian media are for Russia.



----

I'm absolutely sure that the US will not risk a full frontal war. It will be the end of the world as we know it. Nuclear warfare will ensue if the US challenges Russia in Russia's backyard.
 
Are you a member of Nashi? You are even following Putin's official line regarding nuclear weapons, which he mentioned yesterday. :lol:
 
Essaux said:
A very interesting video to watch, especially for those who think that the USA never have any bad intentions when meddling in yet another place around the world. And that there aren't hidden motives in certain actions. And that Western media aren't thoroughly biased and de facto propaganda channels as well as Russian media are for Russia.



----

I'm absolutely sure that the US will not risk a full frontal war. It will be the end of the world as we know it. Nuclear warfare will ensue if the US challenges Russia in Russia's backyard.
Click to expand...


Seek help immediately.
 
Sir Matt said:
Are you a member of Nashi? You are even following Putin's official line regarding nuclear weapons, which he mentioned yesterday. :lol:
Click to expand...

Up next, the views of Goebbels about on the terrorist Allied plot to attack the coast of France.
 
It seems to me that the Ukrainian army has fought much better than Russia thought it would. The separatists had been pushed back and were close to defeat. So in come more Russian forces in an overt invasion of Ukrainian territory to fight directly for the conquest of parts of Eastern Ukraine. The Ukrainian President says that they are on the brink of all out war with Russia and that it will soon be too late to avert it and the EU and US will have to back the Ukrainian Govt or set a terrible precedent.


I don’t see any sign that the Ukrainian Govt is backing down which means that they will be asking for weapons and financial support to carry on the fight. Unless the Russians commit overwhelming numbers which at this point they appear unwilling or unable to do then the war goes on for a while. I don’t see Russia winning unless the west forces Ukraine to submit to partition. How long can Russia sustain an open war?


What if the Ukrainian Govt sees its only chance of victory is to attack Russian economic interests directly. Pipelines are very vulnerable and hard to protect. As long as Poroshenko thought he could win by restricting his targets to those on Ukrainian territory that was never going to happen. Now that Russia has driven tanks across the border to engage Ukrainian regular army units he has to rethink whether he can beat them with one hand tied behind his back. Is that what he means when he says Ukraine is on the brink of an all out war with Russia?
 
Sir Matt said:
The ever-reliable Russian (state owned, via Gazprom) media: http://www.ntv.ru/novosti/1204919/

:lol: America created Ebola! How else can you explain the doctors recovering so quickly once they got back to the US?
Click to expand...

Russia and Russian media are just a complete orgy of state sponsored lies and propaganda these days.Putin has turned the press into a weapon against his own public. Its truly become a mafia state.

As an example, a newspaper publisher was beaten up by thugs after publishing the funerals of two Russian soldiers who died in Ukraine - obviously because Putin has been lying through his teeth about the presence of Russian troops on Ukrainian soil.

On a more encouraging note, I'm glad Khodorkovsky is finally speaking out and hope he continues exposing Putin's vile strategy of deceit.



With war under way in Ukraine, Russians don’t like what little they learn

http://seattletimes.com/html/nationworld/2024429000_russiainsidexml.html

BERLIN — The secret funerals are back. So are motherly measures. As the Ukraine-Russia conflict enters its sixth month, there are signs from inside Russia that the nation’s nerves are beginning to fray.

Evidence of the extent of Russian military involvement in Ukraine has been dribbling out for months. Last week, it reached a level at which Ukrainian and many Western officials finally referred to it as invasion. But recently, from media accounts and more, it also has been leaking into Russia itself, despite an official government policy that what’s happening in Ukraine is all about Ukraine.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a Russian dissident who was jailed for a decade and released suddenly last winter by Russian President Vladimir Putin, posted a statement on his website Thursday saying it was time to acknowledge reality. “We are fighting Ukraine — for real,” he wrote. “We are sending soldiers and equipment.”

But, he then asked, why is Russia not publicly acknowledging this? His answer: This effort is nothing more than the latest example of a long-standing tradition.

“All this time our authorities have been lying through their teeth, just like they did about Afghanistan back in the ’80s; and about Chechnya in the ’90s,” he wrote. “Today, they are lying about Ukraine. And while it goes on, we have been burying those on both sides who, until recently, we held as co-workers, friends and family.”

The reasons Khodorkovsky, and according to reports from a growing number of those inside the Russian information bubble, believe their nation is lying to them are growing.

In recent days: After more than 100 Russian soldiers were killed in a single battle inside Ukraine in mid-August, media reports noted that their bodies were being returned with death certificates structured to make it appear they died elsewhere. In that same battle, an additional 300 were reported to have been injured.

A group of Russian mothers realized that instead of the official military story — that their sons had been sent on a training mission in Russia — their sons were now prisoners of war in Ukraine.

The estimate of at least 1,000 active Russian troops now fighting in Ukraine was essentially confirmed by the head of Ukraine’s pro-Russian separatists, who explained their presence in the middle of what he depicts as a civil war between Ukrainians by saying they were using their vacation days to join the fight.

On Friday, Russia officially labeled a St. Petersburg soldiers’ mothers group as “foreign agents,” an insulting label requiring them to note this status in fundraising and information efforts. In recent weeks, stories have begun to appear in Russian media about mothers around Russia confused by the seemingly secret deaths and burials of their military sons.

One group of mothers, reported on in the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung, noticed large numbers of Ukrainian comments on the social-media pages of their sons, and thus learned that their sons had been taken captive in Ukraine.

The mothers insist they were told their sons were heading from their base four hours north of Moscow to a southern base not far from the Ukraine border. After learning their sons had been captured inside Ukraine, they were told it was a mistake. Their sons, the government said, had gotten lost and strayed more than 10 miles beyond the shared border by accident.

One mother, recalling how in Chechnya it often came down to mothers themselves heading into conflict zones to negotiate the return of their captured soldier sons, told the newspaper: “If the government won’t act, it looks like once again it’s time for motherly measures.”
 
I was reading about the history of NTV and found out that, stunningly, NTV was forcibly taken over by Gazprom in 2000 after it reported on the Apartment bombings in 1999 suggesting involvement by the FSB and having a puppet critical of Putin in one of its shows. The tax police, Putin's favorite tool for maintaining order amongst the wealthy, were highly involved.

The story about the newspaper editor is completely unsurprising. I think I posted a NYT article about the abuse and murder of journalists who were critical of the Putin regime. Even small town editors were beaten and left for dead by Putin's local goons.

https://www.redcafe.net/threads/russian-journalists-fighting-graft-pay-in-blood.297928/
 
Putin claims Russian forces 'could conquer Ukraine capital in two weeks'

Vladimir Putin has said Russian forces could conquer the Ukrainian capital, Kiev, in two weeks if he so ordered, the Kremlin has confirmed.

Moscow declined to deny that the president had spoken of taking Kiev in a phone conversation on Friday with José Manuel Barroso, the outgoing president of the European commission.

Yuri Ushakov, a Kremlin foreign policy adviser, said on Tuesday that the Barroso leak had taken Putin's remarks out of context.

"This is incorrect, and is outside all the normal framework of diplomatic practice, if he did say it. This is simply not appropriate for a serious political figure," he said of the Barroso leak, according to the Russian Interfax news agency.

EU leaders held a summit on Saturday to decide who should run the union for the next five years, but the session was quickly preoccupied by Putin's invasion of Ukraine and how to respond.

Barroso told the closed meeting that Putin had told him Kiev would be an easy conquest for Russia, according to the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica. According to the account, Barroso asked Putin about the presence of Russian troops in eastern Ukraine. Nato says there are at least 1,000 Russian forces on the wrong side of the border. The Ukrainians put the figure at 1,600.

"The problem is not this, but that if I want I'll take Kiev in two weeks," Putin said, according to La Repubblica.

The Kremlin did not deny Putin had spoken of taking Kiev, but instead complained about the leak of the Barroso remarks.

Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, attended the EU summit and painted an apocalyptic picture of the conflict, with EU leaders dropping their usual public poise in a heated debate.

Dalia Grybauskaite, the Lithuanian president, declared Russia was "at war with Europe". The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, the main mediator with Putin, was said to be furious with the Russian leader, warning that he was "irrational and unpredictable", while David Cameron was said to have raised the issue of Britain discussing policy options regarding Putin.

Cameron likened the west's dilemma with Putin to relations between the then British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, with Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1938, when Anglo-French appeasement encouraged the Nazi leader to launch the second world war the following year.

"We run the risk of repeating the mistakes made in Munich in 1938. We cannot know what will happen next," Cameron was reported as saying. "This time we cannot meet Putin's demands. He has already taken Crimea and we cannot allow him to take the whole country."

Merkel pointed to the dangers for the Baltic states on Russia's western borders, home to large ethnic Russian minorities. She said Estonia and Latvia could be Putin's next targets, according to La Repubblica.

Defence of the two countries – both of which are Nato and EU members and part of the euro single currency zone – is the centrepiece of this week's Nato summit in Wales and the alliance is said to view that defence as a red line which Putin dare not cross. The US president, Barack Obama, is to deliver a speech in Estonia on Wednesday repeating that message.

The main decisions facing the Nato summit in Newport include deploying rapid response Nato spearhead units to the Baltic and Poland if necessary, stockpiling arms and equipment in the region, and strengthening the Nato presence in the east.

The plans call for units of up to 5,000 forces to be deployed within two to five days, according to a senior military official at Nato.

To try to avoid a bigger legal dispute with Russia, the Nato presence in the east will not be called permanent – proscribed under a Nato-Russia pact from 1997 – but back-to-back rotation of alliance forces will mean there is a persistent presence, according to a senior Nato diplomat.

If the Baltics and Polish are reassured by Nato, there will be little short-term comfort for Ukraine at the summit, which Poroshenko will also attend.

"It's not actually Nato's job to be the police officer of Europe. Nato is not the first responder on this," the diplomat said. "Nato's planning is all about how to defend allies, not partners like Ukraine."

At the weekend, Grybauskaite demanded that the west arm Ukraine. That is unlikely. "Nato is not going to launch a defence capacity-building mission in Ukraine," said the diplomat.

The summit is also expected to take Nato membership bids by four former Soviet states off the table in order to not antagonise Putin.

Russia is certain to respond to the Nato moves in eastern Europe, though it is not yet clear how.

"Nato's planned action … is evidence of the desire of US and Nato leaders to continue their policy of aggravating tensions with Russia," said Mikhail Popov, a Kremlin military official. Russia's military posture would be adapted appropriately.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-could-conquer-ukraine-capital-kiev-fortnight
Click to expand...
 
Wondering why there has been a sudden change of tone in the conflict.
Could be something to do with the initial findings on the downing of MH17 being published on 9th Sept.

I'd be interested to hear @Raoul's take on this cease-fire, by watching CNN
 
Fergie's gum said:
Wondering why there has been a sudden change of tone in the conflict.
Could be something to do with the initial findings on the downing of MH17 being published on 9th Sept.

I'd be interested to hear @Raoul's take on this cease-fire, by watching CNN
Click to expand...

Haven't been following it much lately to be honest, but I'm guessing it has something to do with a direct Phone call between Putin and Poroshenko where they decided to support an immediate ceasefire. For Putin, he needed an "out" that would allow him to de-escalate without having to admit he was involved in the first place, lest face staggering sanctions that would've thrown the Russian economy back to the mid 90s. It also allowed Poroshenko to move forward or else deal with a Russian counteroffensive on Mariupol. Generally a good thing for both sides.
 
What do you mean invasion? There are just hints and whispers! It's entirely Western propaganda. If you paid attention to real news sources like RTV, RIA Novosti, and Pravda, you would know the truth--that the US is invading Russia! -Danny
 
You must log in or register to reply here.