I wonder if anyone has thought of both sides declaring Ukraine to be a ‘Neutral Zone’ and simply keeping out of it.
I agree, at least until things cool down, but I think that Ukraine is stirring this. If the US wasn’t sabre rattling then the loudhailer from Kyiv might be muted.
That would be fine, as long as both sides would keep to it. Didn’t work with the Crimea, did it? However, Crimea was historically part of Russia not Ukraine, it was Kruschev who “gave” it to Ukraine, so some justification there.
Plus, if I understand correctly, Crimea is Russia’s largest naval base. If Ukraine was to have joined NATO it would have been like Germany getting control of Scapa Flow in 1916.
Not could be but would be axed according to the US🤨
Ukraine crisis: Nord Stream 2 pipeline could be axed, US warns
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I’m not slumming it with the riffraff, great value and all that 
Liz Truss defends using government plane for Australia trip
US warns EU:Russia gas link could be axed!!! The US should not be announcing what the EU might do. Biden is out of control and Putin is playing him like a trout.
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I’m delighted her egocentric sense of entitlement has switched in. She’s sooooo much more important now than UK WW cheese ambassador, except she’s not 
I reckon this Ukraine thing is little more than a game of chess that has got rather out of hand.
There do seem to be some weird moves taking place though. I mean, I wonder what the relevance is of the US placing 8,500 troops on deployment stand-by when they seem to have no intention of actually sending them to Ukraine.
Then there is the gas pipeline thing, which I believe runs from Russia to Germany, and so surely is not under the control of the US in the first place.
Best way to resolve it is for all parties to stop meddling in the internal affairs of other countries.
I also wonder about how the people who live in certain areas of Ukraine feel about the situation. Perhaps they might actually prefer to live in Russia ? I wonder if anyone will seriously consider asking them.
I have heard it stated “Well they do speak Russian” …
But this is the same as saying that USA, Canada, Australia etc speak English - it doesn’t mean that they want to get invaded by UK.
It is complicated though Mat. It’s not just that they speak Russian - in many areas in the east - as in Crimea - they are Russian - ethnically, culturally, etc.
As a separate country, in any meaningful sense, Ukraine is only 25 years old - its borders had little significance when it was part of the USSR - so like many colonies around the world they are artificial when you look at people’s cultural etc allegiances. Let’s not forget what happened in the Balkans when the communist lid came off ethnic/cultural differences.
When I was working there (in the early ‘noughties’) there were open cultural divisions - Ukrainians from the west, for example, were very sensitive about putting things in Ukrainian rather than Russian, even though (to the outsider) the two languages are virtually indistinguishable, and everybody actually spoke Russian anyway (it was taught in all the schools in the soviet period) but not everybody spoke Ukrainian.
Is it a bit like the ‘language’ many English people think that Scots are speaking when they speak English with a strong Scottish accent and some distinctive words, but many in Scotland aver is a separate language?
I am not, of course, confusing this with Gaelic, which is a separate language.
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Do you mean this language?
Really very different and not just from the vocab p.o.v.
“many English people think”
It would be better were more to.
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@vero & @Griffin36 , yes to the former and, I think yes to the latter, though I don’t think I have come across that, but there is a broad opinion that they are both dialects of English rather than different langauges. Equally there is a large body of opinion to the contrary.
But there is no division of opinion that my Grandads’ native language, Welsh, is indeed a stand alone language. Cornish and Breton, closely related I think, are not French or English dialects.
So back to my question, is Ukrainian to Russian similar as Scots is to English?
Russian and Ukrainian are a bit more different than Spanish and Portuguese, apparently.
I must admit I never really bottomed out the difference between Russian and Ukrainian - 90% of the grammar and 90% of the words seemed the same to me - and almost the whole alphabet - the main difference being in the pronunciation. The thing is though that the differences were already politicised, in all kinds of complicated ways.
The most common women’s name in both languages, for example - Olga - has a hard ‘g’ in Russian, but sounds more like ‘Ol-ya’ in Ukrainian - a typical difference - I observed - because the two apparently different sounds are actually really close in the mouth. I can think of much more dramatic regional differences in English pronunciation - which might be carriers of class difference, but not nationalism.
Olga was my interpreter’s name - we’re still in touch - she was fluent in Russian, Ukrainian and English, from Kiev but now (20 years on) lives in Moscow - chief executive of a large Russian organisation.
And Spaniards can’t normally understand Portuguese, or so I’m told by both Spanish and portuguese I’ve known.
No idea, I looked it up I don’t speak either Russian or Ukrainian and I expect there’s a lot of political theorising going on too. I think mutual intelligibility of fairly close languages depends massively on the amount of practical knowledge about languages and will of the person trying to understand, I say this from my experience of going from eg German to Dutch to Danish. I didn’t find Brazilian Portuguese too hard after Spanish but I am not a native speaker of Spanish and I do speak various other languages so I’m not representative.
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My neighbour, French born son of Portuguese immigrants, when asked by me to give me an idea of what was meant in something Spanish I was faced with it said ‘no chance, not even worth looking at it’.
An interesting aside into this is once when I was still working I overnighted at a little used French routier and there were half a dozen lorries outside, but I didn’t look too closely at their nationality. Once inside I was invited to sit at a long table in the traditional French manner at which were seated about 12 drivers. They all spoke the same language which sounded vaguely Eastern European to me, but when I managed to find one speaker who had a little English, I asked him where they were all from. Portugal he said.
Of course they could have been immigrants to Portugal.
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