Is it possible that all this Ukraine business may have something to do with the oil and natural gas reserves located underneath the eastern part of the country ?
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They had no possibility of joining Nato when they were under Russian rule.
Past tense.
I think Johnson and Truss have maybe been made to look fools.
In what way?
I think they do a good job of it without any need for external helpâŚ
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Well, IMO when Macron, Scholz and even Volodymyr Zelensky were trying to talk things down, the clowns Johnson, Truss and Wallace were talking things up, based on nothing but their desire to showcase their (non existant) international importance. Johnsonâs got to deflect from his home issues, Truss is trying to position herself as Thatcher 2.0 and Wallace is just an idiot 
The Russians couldnât have made it clearer that they had nothing but contempt for the three of them. However they took Biden, Macron and Scholz seriously. Must be galling for Johnson to be seen internationally as an untrustworthy liar.
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And do you think that Putin is not doing exactly the same, the dire Covid situation and the total mess Russia is in at home, do a bit of tub thumping and get everyone behind him, it is all about the meglamaniacs ego trip, flexing his muscles and see me I am the centre of the universe 
The sooner Putin pegs it the better for the world.
It wonât be long before the arsehole in China is doing the same with Tiawan because his ego wonât like Putin getting all the limelight.
Donât forget Putin has murdered people on the streets of the UK and elsewhere.
It is no wonder countries around the periphery of Russia want to join NATO, he is not to be trusted neither any of his government.
His armed forces have colluded in the shooting down of an airliner in Ukraine .
He is a thug and murderer
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That is absolutely true and IMO is all the more reason why festina lente should be the order of the day regarding Ukrainian NATO membership. Putin will not he around for ever, but those lives that might be lost through baiting the Bear will never come back.
I thought Scholz was quit courageous making his little joke yesterdayâŚ
â Biting gag from Scholz just now.
He says he doesnât think he or Putin will have to face the issue of Ukraineâs Nato membership while theyâre in office.
pause
[looks at Putin] âI donât know how long the president intends to stay in office.â
who said Germans have no sense of humour?
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Thatâs what I thought immediately but I didnât want to offend anyone 
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Iâm not anti-Russian, Iâm anti-Putin. For one very specific reason: heâs always sticking his nose into other peopleâs business. He meddled in Brexit and the Trump election; he is meddling in Eastern Europe. He doesnât care for democracy or ordinary people, only about power, and anything that stands in the way of increasing that is to be demolished. Heâd like to make the invasion of Ukraine into a question of maintaining Russian sovereignty over the former USSR territories against NATO. But even to frame the question in those terms is to play to his vision of a world in which the Cold War is still going on, rather than todayâs reality of autonomous states.
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The British.
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I had a Russian colleague (PhD scientist) who thoroughly regretted glasnost, hated the way the Russian state had become poor and weak, and very much wanted the re-emergence of the USSR. While life in Russian then was oppressive and often very hard, many Russians then felt they could be proud of their country.
Picking up the post from @DrMarkH Russia is no longer a country to be proud of, but rather becoming a European backwater. Iâm pretty sure that Putin is only at the head of a large number of people who all share a similar goal, to restore their country to power, possible while squirrelling away some personal wealth in more attractive western countries.
I donât think that Shostakovich was a fan. He was forced to write music for the Communist Regime.
Compare the music of that time with his wonderful Jazz Suites.
Dodgy map, neither N Macedonia nor Montenegro shown as NATO members. But dodgy arguments also. The only threat Putin feels from NATO is the threat it represents to his own aggression. NATO does not slavishly follow US direction however much Putin would like to suggest otherwise, as witness the expedition into Libya as well as Iraq - the idea NATO would ever contemplate a direct threat to Russia is preposterous.
The best way to prevent more countries joining NATO is to remove the incentive (need) for them to do so - by ceasing to pose a threat to them! And important though the US is to NATO, it is not politically in their gift, in 1990 or now, to refuse entry to other nations who freely choose to apply to join.
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People faced hours of queuing for bread in Russia during the USSR. Whatever people now dream of, it isnât that. Or the conditions that led to Chernobyl, if you saw that filmâŚMaybe memory is a bit selective.
I think that the whole notion of living in a âgreatâ nation is a bit of a red herring anyway. What matters most is the quality of life. So I do agree about the damaging effects of plutocracy, not just in Russia but here too. When people are forced to use food banks, something is broken, and whether or not there is a big army is neither here nor there.
I couldnât disagree more, the US runs NATO.
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Well the US certainly does have a great deal of influence, which makes it all the more unfortunate that it is the US that sends its military uninvited into foreign countries to assassinate certain individuals, or to kidnap them off the streets in order to transport them to Guantanamo Bay and there imprison them without trial for years, with some torture thrown in for good measure.
Both the US and Russia are as bad as each other in their own differing ways, and perhaps it is about time that they each took the plank out of their own eye before posturing about the speck in the eye of the other.
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The US is far and away the biggest contributor to NATO and I think a balanced view is that (and I am astonished to find myself almost in agreement with Trump) would be that they do not get âValue for moneyâ from that contribution. Well, actually they do, but in terms of a more stable world in which they get to sell more goods as the world all benefits from the peace dividend.
But that peace dividend is not the exclusive preserve of the US and China in particular has gained from this massively in recent years without making any contribution at all. Russia never really gained, but mainly because they export very little of value other than hydrocarbons, and as we have seen recently, the value of those rises in times of unrest.
For those conspiracy theorists who think the US runs the world as they like, consider that ventures into Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya were all portrayed as defensive moves and they tried and failed to have NATO join them, instead relying variously on individual countriesâ support. So the notion that the US ârunsâ NATO just doesnât stack up. NATO would be a hollow shell without them and that ought to be a cause for concern for European nations in particular - it is an unhealthy reliance but actually, unlike some other global institutions it is surprisingly democratic, despite that dependance.
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