Thanks!
It doesn’t look pretty indeed, they’ve lost a couple of winnable state elections this year haven’t they? I’m wondering when the penny will drop for them. Think the issue for them isn’t going to be so much of what stance they take, but that they don’t seem to have a plan or direction at all, and that’s going to cost them because it makes them look incompetent, which is not a good thing for someone who (as I understand it) campaigned on being the continuity candidate from Merkel.
In a way he is continuity. Merkel hasn’t done a great job recently of fronting up to the mistake of ostpolitik, doubling Germany’s reliance on Russian energy during her Chancellorship, and the obstacles placed in Ukraine’s path to NATO membership, for example.
Alleged Russian interference in UK politics didn’t achieve anything like that sort of reliance. Clearly Russia got more bang for its buck with the Bundestag…?
*Just to add, I’m not denying Russian interference in UK politics, just the extent/effectiveness of it.
what’s still boggling my mind, is the Russian thought process to obliterate all existing infrastructure in land which they want to annex. razing entire cities to the ground to what end?
His actual tweet is even better.
probably behind a paywall
this is a big issue for me. Putin buys the alliance of Turkey, makes Erdogan a Marionette and holds up any progress in the EU of getting anything done with the invasion of Ukraine and Scandinavian entrance into the EU
meanwhile
I have little hope in the SPD on this issue atm. The two coalition partners need to turn up the pressure. The Greens seem happy atm to being received as the adults in the room and gaining popularity, but at some point they won’t be able to avoid simply looking complicit.
FFS wow…look at that.
I think that is a significant misreading of the situation with Turkey. I don’t think Erdogan is in Putin’s back pocket, far from it. Turkey and Russia have had some fairly intense conflict in the past few years, some of it damned close to direct, and that hasn’t gone anywhere. Azerbaijan and Armenia are essentially proxy states, and there is ongoing conflict in Syria.
However, he is also not in any meaningful sense an ally of the West. His relationship with the US and NATO is at best transactional. He has no interest in defending any other NATO country, let alone adding new members. Ukraine is nothing more than opportunities - the opportunity to see Russia damaged (hence happily selling Bayraktars to UKR) but also the opportunity to extract a suite of concessions from the rest of NATO. Bully Greece, get a free hand against the Kurds, maybe take another bite of Armenia, silence some Kurds in Europe, he has quite a shopping list.
fair enough. it just seems very convenient for him that at one point he offered to mediate a peace agreement IIRC.
To put distance between their troops and Ukranian artillery maybe ? Oh , and the fact that they are vindictive cunts of course.
We visited one of the cemeteries in #Marioupol last week. We saw there thousands of recent graves, surmounted by a number. On this side of the cemetery the numbers went beyond 3000
Bit graphic