@Peter wrote
A “European army” would never work though.
Each country operates its military in support of its foreign policy, and the countries in Europe are mostly very different.
In the video of the UK professor you posted a few pages back it is claimed that last years events actually increased a united stand of EU countries considerably. More so than ever before. Too bad UK is „out“… perhaps Boris was a P-Troll as well?
I’m confident I will see a common EU military doctrine and force in my lifetime. There’s no alternative to it anyway.
In any case, @Silvaire, while I’m not a fan of the Biden administration, the one thing these guys get right, IMO, is the response to the Russian invasion. Europe and particularly Germany (and Italy and Austria) would just have looked the other way.
It wasn’t the US weapons supply response, which is so far OK, it was (and is) the demonstrated inability of Biden and his equally unimpressive and largely brainless bunch to intimidate Putin and thereby remove the need to respond. As a result what happened has happened and while I hope the Ukrainians will prevail on their own, with armament from others, I think in the end the US will by necessity have to do something more direct unless they want Putin to keep going, as he otherwise will.
Other than that, ever heard of kompromitat? Google it. Pretty obvious.
The word is actually compromat and as a native of a commie country I am well familiar with it. It tends to involve a honey trap and even the Brits were doing that, to recruit agents in the USSR (up to the 1970s or so).
Putin will have compromat on many many European politicians. Dead easy to collect. Some years ago you would walk down Wenceslas Square and it would be lined with girls serving customers mostly from, ahem, not all that far north of there. Today it has been cleaned up a bit; gone off the pavement. Lots of speculation on some current top-level players, too. Boris? Compromat on Boris is like compromat on Hugh Hefner 
the one thing these guys get right, IMO, is the response to the Russian invasion.
Yes; the US has been very good. They actually don’t have all that much to give away, given their worldwide “obligations”. This video is not short but very good in covering the manufacturing challenges:
172driver wrote:
That said, why someone like Schröder (her predecessor) still has German citizenship and has not been tried for treason is beyond me.
That is a very valid question indeed.
Peter wrote:
Putin might now have wanted to gamble on how Trump may have reacted, but it remains an open question because I doubt anybody else knows either
We will probably never know why Putin quite openly supported Trump and was all for his re-election. It is also known that during the 2016 election Moscow claimed several times that electing Hillary Clinton might lead to war. It is therefore quite possible that with Trump in power, Putin might have tried other ways to achieve his ends in Ukraine and quite possibly he could have gotten some “deal” out of Trump to keep Ukraine out of NATO or whatever. How Trump himself might have reacted we will never know.
Compromat on Boris is like compromat on Hugh Hefner
I think this is a big part of what is wrong with our politics at the moment. Everybody has something that at the very least looks shameful in their past.
The only people who can make it are those who don’t care, partly because they can live with the opprobrium but mostly because we as the electorate are more willing to tolerate scoundrels than hypocrites.
That said, who Boris slept with wouldn’t concern me unless…
Russia continues making grave tactical mistakes such as bunching up scores of troops in vulnerable buildings.
Ukraine exploits these with MLRS rocket artillery, probably killing hundreds in one strike
even Russia acknowledged 63 dead, and several pro-Russian bloggers accuse them of massively underreporting the true figure.
I read of another, similar strike today on Der Spiegel…
Yes. You can find good info and analysis each morning here
https://www.youtube.com/c/ReportingfromUkraine
This is interesting – I wonder if it is true
Peter wrote:
This is interesting – I wonder if it is true
I searched for a German language source to confirm the figures for Germany. This article from BusinessInsider
confirms a 51% increase in the value of German imports from Russia in the first half of 2022, mainly due to the enormous price increases of oil and gas during that period, despite reduced volumes of trade. These fell further and dramatically so in the second half of 2022. Still, the figure given in your source seems plausible.
OK; if those increases in imports from Russia are due to gas etc price increases, then the argument the chart attempts to make is disingenuous
Peter wrote:
OK; if those increases in imports from Russia are due to gas etc price increases, then the argument the chart attempts to make is disingenuous
Yeah, that’s the problem in todays world, you cannot trust any media source to just present data in a neutral way, there is usually some level of framing or nudging going on and thus it’s important to look behind the scenes.
The European attempts to get rid of Russian energy imports are real, though if course it differs from country to country how sincerely they are trying to cut in the middle-to-long term.
This is one topic the German government has really woken up to, albeit there still are many proponents of some sort of “normalisation” of trade relations in the governing SPD (social democratic party) especially among backbenchers. But the government line is pretty clear that Russian gas and oil imports are to be reduced to zero.
