Comments by "George Carty" (@GCarty80) on "Jake Broe" channel.

  1. Please don't let Putin be the fourth tyrant to deliberately starve Ukraine (after Lenin in 1922, Stalin in 1932 and Hitler in 1942)!
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  2. If you're a registered Republican then please vote against pro-Russia candidates in whatever primary elections you can vote in!
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  3. Don't you mean rename it "Johnsongrad" (Джонсонград)?
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  4. Germany didn't get to keep its pre-war borders after World War II but lost everything east of the Oder and Neisse rivers: how many people think that maybe Russia should lose the Kuban, either becoming an additional Ukrainian territory or a restored Circassian state?
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  5.  @JakeBroe  Anyone else looking forward to the white-red-white flag of Free Belarus flying over Minsk again?
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  6. Plus if Russia had occupied all of Ukraine it would mean millions of Ukrainian refugees moving long-term to western Europe -- the probable result of that would be that the politics of western European nations would change, causing those nations to come to see Russia as a blood enemy much as the nations of eastern Europe already do now.
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  7. The Netherlands is well and truly pissed at Russia for murdering 193 of their citizens aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17.
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  8.  @flipw3605  I don't see the UK rejoining the EU any time soon, not so much because the UK won't realize Brexit was a disaster, but more because the EU won't want the UK back.
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  9.  @denko44  Why do people talk about "fear of escalation" rather than the more honest "fear of nuclear war"?
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  10. Incidentally should we in the West not be using the decolonized version of that country's name: "Qazaqstan"?
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  11. ​ @Ariel-x1x Although I'd consider even Belarus to be more occupied by Russia than allied with it these days.
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  12.  @Nessy-of-the-Lynn  Because his opponents weren't united.
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  13. ​ @koma-k Don't petrostates tend to be authoritarian, because the state has an independent income that frees it from having to tax (and be accountable to) the people?
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  14. Don't get too cocky: I'd say we're currently more like 1943 than 1945.
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  15.  @champanachampana4881  It's why all Russian war memorials define the war as 1941-1945, not 1939-1945 like in Western countries.
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  16.  @Equaliser420  You do know that Ukrainians have their own saying similar to Ben Franklin's liberty vs safety quote? "When a people chooses bread over freedom, it eventually loses everything, including bread. If people choose freedom, they will have bread grown by themselves and not taken away by anyone."
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  17.  @jaksap  Which of course is one reason why Russia must be stopped, as their victory would embolden other potential imperialist aggressors in the future.
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  18.  @sticks_studiosHQ  It's not HIS "poor little country": real Chechen patriots are fighting for Ukraine in the Sheikh Mansur and Dzhokhar Dudayev battalions!
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  19. Putin thinks his nukes will save him from Hitler's fate.
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  20. I don't think any country could fight for years at the level of intensity we've seen up to now in this current war, unless the combatants regressed to World War II-level technology...
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  21. I suppose the Spanish Christians had a point calling the war on the Almohads a holy war, given that the Almohads were one of the few medieval Muslim regimes to forcibly convert Christian (and Jewish) populations to Islam.
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  22. Is it possible that the Ukranians are using Bakhmut much as the Russians did Stalingrad in WWII, and that in the next few weeks we'll see the equivalent of Operation Uranus?
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  23. You remind me of the character in Captain America who said "never forget that the first country the Nazis conquered was their own".
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  24. I wonder if he's one of those who (like most Russians) blames Western meddling for the 2014 Revolution of Dignity itself?
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  25. Tucker Carlson was almost certainly kompromized from the start.
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  26.  @rumblebunz8081  I think D Gentry's point is that if the water is flooding down the course of the Dnipro river (due to a blown dam) then it's no longer flowing through the canal to Crimea .
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  27. I suspect the West's reaction to Russia's 2014 theft of Crimea was muted for the same reason that Hitler was appeased over the Sudetenland: because the aggressor's ethnicity was a majority of the population in the territory in question.
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  28. "The Russian state is not based on treaties" -- Sergey Kirienko (First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia), 2017
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  29. Whether we liked it or not the Taliban were more in tune with Afghan society and culture than the western-backed government ever was. That will never be the case for the Russian invaders with respect to Ukrainian society and culture.
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  30.  @JakeBroe  Or to use an old Ukrainian slogan, "Свобода народам!​ Свобода людині!​"
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  31. The closest Ukrainian equivalent of that quote (or perhaps more analogous to the Ben Franklin liberty vs. safety quote) is as follows: "Коли поміж хлібом і свободою народ обирає хліб, він зрештою втрачає все, в тому числі і хліб. Якщо народ обирає свободу, він матиме хліб, вирощений ним самим і ніким не відібраний." Translation: "When a people chooses bread between bread and freedom, it ultimately loses everything, including bread. If a people chooses freedom, it will have bread grown by itself and not taken away by anyone."
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  32.  @atomicplaygirl5743  During the Cold War, the Ukrainian national cause was seen in the West as a far-right cause, but now it is supported by almost everyone but the far right (and admittedly the far left, although they are far less influential in the West than the far right).
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  33.  @JakeBroe  I expect Kim and his inner circle still have clean drinking water, surely?
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  34.  @jacktenrec472  Isn't that what Miguel was saying, that Kadyrov and his quisling army are not representative of Chechens?
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  35.  @merlin7766  The problem isn't just Mike Johnson, but with all the Americans who support Russia.
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  36.  @AnthonyOMulligan-yv9cg  Makes me think Trump's party shouldn't really have the right to call itself "Republican"!
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  37.  @rambleon2838  No surprise that the Poles refused to let Soviet troops pass through their territory given that the Soviets had tried to conquer Poland in 1920.
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  38. Perhaps Russia should lose the Kuban (that's the bit of southern Russia east of Crimea and north of the Georgian border), to make sure it can never again attempt to starve the global South with a Black Sea naval blockade? It would also fit with the final lines of the Ukrainian army anthem: "A united Ukrainian state, eternal and whole from the San to the Caucasus!"
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  39. I don't know why the US still has anything to do with Saudi Arabia now that they don't need their oil anymore.
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  40. And Karjala to Finland, and Chishima and Karafuto to Japan?
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  41. Johnson received $37,000 in campaign contributions from the American Ethane Company, which is based in Texas but owned mostly by Russian oligarchs.
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  42. There's a reason Jake likes to refer to her as "Marjorie Traitor Greene"!
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  43. The rumours that started the riots were suggesting that they were "Mountain Jews" indigenous to Dagestan, who were returning after they'd emigrated to Israel during the 1990s.
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  44.  @santorizzuto7360  My argument was more that World War II weapons were truly mass-producible in a way that modern weapons are not.
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  45.  @lesbrunswick5137  Plus Kherson is not only the biggest Ukrainian city to fall to the 2022 invasion, but has a vital economic position as the way Ukrainian grain gets to the outside world, comparable to the role of New Orleans for the American grain belt.
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  46. The fact that Russia carried out assassinations on British soil (first of Alexander Litvinenko, and then the novichok chemical attacks in Salisbury) may well be a factor in driving Britain's hard-line stance, just as that of the Netherlands is driven by a desire to avenge the Dutch citizens murdered aboard Malaysian Airlines Flight 17.
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  47.  @jonm7272  The UK equivalent to a US Representative is a Member of Parliament (MP), and David Lammy is the MP for Tottenham.
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  48.  @speurtighearnamacterik8230  Which I guess means that Stalin was just as much of a Nazi collaborator as Bandera, and with far less excuse: Bandera was looking to liberate his nation while Stalin was looking only to expand his empire.
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  49. They likely don't mind as long as they get lots of cheap oil and gas.
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  50. I deactivated my X the day I heard Trump won.
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  51. Which Americans (other than the Rosenbergs) got the death penalty for working with Russia?
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  52. "The Russian state is not based on treaties." -- Sergey Kiriyenko, 2017
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  53.  @nevco8774  I'm not convinced this notion of a northern Chinese outlet to the Pacific makes much sense: if Russia collapsed to the point that the Chinese moved on outer Manchuria, wouldn't the US be likely to greenlight Japan taking Sakhalin and the Kurils (both of which were Japanese prior to World War II)?
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  54. Yup -- they reminded me of inmates liberated from Nazi concentration camps.
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  55.  @JakeBroe  The "March of Ukrainian Nationalists" (the song that you had a soldier play on a recorder on one of your videos a few weeks back) actually concludes with a call to create a "united Ukrainian state, free and strong from the San to the Caucasus". I often thought of that line myself, especially when Russia was plotting to use a Black Sea naval blockade to cause a famine in the Middle East (presumably as a means to flood Europe with starving Arab refugees).
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  56. Note that the USSR was the only country to be actually kicked out of the old League of Nations (in 1939 for invading Finland) as opposed to leaving voluntarily like the other aggressor nations did.
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  57.  @admiralmonocle3874  No, but their battle experience against Russia would be invaluable for training NATO soldiers.
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  58.  @JakeBroe  One of my big worries is that a defeated Russia will go full death cult, with a Russian Hitler (possibly Putin but more likely not) who embraces the prospect of nuclear war. The arguments pointing to that possibility are: * Russia has always relied on military might rather than soft power to project its influence, * The only military might Russia will still have by then is its nukes, as its conventional military will have been well and truly trashed in Ukraine, and * Even Russia's nukes will likely have a limited shelf-life, due to the same all-pervasive corruption that did so much to cripple Russia's conventional military. Perhaps they'll start thinking "use 'em or lose 'em"?
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  59.  Johnny H Johns  Isn't the United States full of dead shopping malls too, due to a frenzy of overbuilding during the noughties?
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  60. Wasn't Belarus (at least prior to 2020) a heavily subsidized propaganda showcase for Russkiy Mir (much as during the Cold War Cuba was for the Soviets and West Berlin was for NATO)? AIUI Russia sold Belarus vast quantities of oil and gas for a nominal price (far more than Belarus needed itself: most was re-exported for full price to the EU) and the profits were used to pay for a generous Soviet-style welfare state.
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  61. As a Brit I now hate Trump almost as much as I hate Putin himself.
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  62. Which non-Tesla, non-Chinese EV brands would people here recommend?
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  63. Indeed it is: Gazprom is a (state-owned) natural gas company.
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  64.  @CMY187  To be exact, Tsar Alexander II was one of the first people to be killed by a suicide bomber.
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  65. ​ @BabyBird691  I'm not sure Chamberlain was even a pacifist: my impression was that he was trying to buy time to re-arm.
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  66. "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlement to a McHouse and a McCar" -- James Howard Kunstler, 2005
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  67. The main reason why NATO hasn't fired a shot is because Russia is so hopelessly (and obviously) outmatched in conventional weaponry that they'd go nuclear immediately.
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  68. The Western world stands with Ukraine, but Russia is still pretty popular in much of the global South, perhaps due to OPEC-style solidarity between commodity-exporting nations?
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  69.  @matthewg2530  I'd advise anyone in such a blood-red state or congressional district to register as a Republican so they can vote against any pro-Russia candidates in the Republican primary elections.
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  70.  @xcrockery8080  Surely if British ground-based air defences in 1940 were more dangerous to their own people than to the Germans, it was because of the limitations of technology at the time? The invention of the proximity fuze meant that by 1944 (when the Nazis started launching V-1 flying bombs at London) the British defences were far more effective.
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  71. The main reason the Wehrmacht relied on trains and horse carts for its logistics was because Nazi Germany was desperately short of oil: the whole point of 1942's Fall Blau was to capture Soviet oil supplies in the Caucasus.
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  72. Didn't donate last time, but I decided to chip in £50 this time!
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  73.  @garnertempest4069  And Labour won back in July largely because those people split the right-wing vote, much as Bill Clinton won two elections largely because Ross Perot split the vote.
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  74. A Marshall Plan for Ukraine and a Morgenthau Plan for Russia, perhaps?
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  75.  @fluffcrunchmini4572  My point was more that the Rosenbergs were a really extreme case, given that they gave the Russians literal nuclear weapon secrets.
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  76.  @TheFeldhamster  Another thing that really hurt Russia during the '90s was the economic division of labour within the Soviet Empire: most of the consumer manufacturing industries were in the satellite states, while Russia proper produced mainly oil and gas (whose price was low during the '90s, and rose during the early Putin years bringing the prosperity that legitimized his regime) along with weapons (for which there was no market during the '90s, as countries worldwide were looking to cash in on the "peace dividend" meaning that anyone who did want weapons could buy second-hand ones dirt cheap).
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  77. Although the fact that Poland welcomed Chechen refugees while refusing Middle Easterners suggests their issue is with the cultural values of the Middle East rather than with Islam per se. Tying in with your own good point about gender balance, I wonder if it's down to the misogyny of Arab and Afghan cultures? I do believe that Putin was trying to flood Europe with more Middle Eastern refugees too, by causing famine there with a Black Sea grain blockade: good thing the Turks seem to have faced him down on that point!
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  78.  @matufamenulis8527  It seems like the US is being let down by the biological frailty of its current President: that's a surprising failure mode that I wouldn't normally have expected in a republic. (Although it is of course common in traditional monarchies: for example if the king fails to produce an heir there can be a war of succession when he dies.)
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  79. Kind of off-topic, but do you think this war in Ukraine will result in the WWII Eastern Front falling out of fashion as a setting for video games (such as the Call of Duty series)?
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  80. It's a real pity that the EU doesn't have provisions to kick out a member which has gone bad like this.
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  81. Vance's entire rise to power was suspicious, almost like he was groomed for the job.
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  82.  @sateentuoksu  Associated Press, a news agency based in New York City.
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  83.  @theresa1305  Do you think Putin may have a hand in America's crisis with asylum seekers crossing the Mexican border? I'm thinking of how Putin got his toady in Minsk to fly Middle Eastern refugees into Belarus and then push them across the Polish border.
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  84. Surely Ron DeSantis would only be able to gerrymander boundaries in Florida not in any of the other 49 states?
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  85.  @onerva0001  I think he's classing the whole Euromaidan thing as "picking a fight with Russia".
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  86. The definition of "treason" in US law is extremely narrow, pretty much only applying to collaborating with a country in a state of hot war with the US (so Russia wouldn't count). Even the Rosenbergs were (strictly speaking) executed for espionage rather than treason.
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  87. Russia won't be able to "pay trillions USD equivalent in reparations" once this war is done: maybe they should lose part of their own territory? Karelia to Finland, Kaliningrad for auction between Germany, Poland and Lithuania, Kuban to Ukraine and Sakhalin Oblast to Japan...
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  88. Stalin would be proud.
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  89.  @martinlatvian5538  Wow, didn't realize Kyiv was that old! That would mean it was founded very shortly after the death of Attila the Hun.
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  90. Although I'm surprised there weren't more WWII-obsessed Brexiters who fell for Russian propaganda about "Ukrainian Nazis".
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  91. Ukraine's "Sudetenland" was Crimea.
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  92. You were a staunch Republican when it was the party of Reagan, not when it was Russia's fifth column in the US.
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  93.  @FredrikLimegård  I'd say ONLY that: hasn't Russia pretty much always been ruled by expansionist tyrants?
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  94.  @valiant9563 I thought the concern about attacking Russian oil infrastructure wasn't that it would risk a nuclear response, but that it would help Trump retake the White House by causing gasoline prices to skyrocket in the US.
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  95.  @cplcabs  I wonder if Japan is hoping that Russia will collapse in the near future, allowing them to reclaim the island of Sakhalin (or Karafuto, as they call it)?
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  96. Although there is the complication that in the eastern half of pre-war Poland the ethnic Poles were a minority: most of the people were Ukrainians and Belarusians.
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  97.  @riversandrds  Peter Thiel?
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  98.  @user-vg9tt4ut1f  Which non-nuclear escalations do you think Western leaders may be afraid of in particular?
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  99. One reason why there are no Arab democracies is that the culture there is still built around tribes, clans and extended families. Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq (to give one example) was basically just the rule of his Tikrit-based clan.
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  100. A-10s are slow by jet standards and would be no match for the advanced air defense systems which both sides in this current war have available to them.
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  101. On the other hand the Gazans still had loads of kids (to the point that over 40% of the territory's population is children under 15) in spite of nightmarish living conditions there.
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  102.  @spxram4793  No: the phenomenon I'm thinking of is the "rentier state". "Dutch disease" refers to how oil and gas exports cause a country's currency to become more valuable, rendering other industries uncompetitive. It is arguably one of the reasons why UK suffered especially badly from deindustrialization after 1980, as North Sea oil exports strengthened the pound.
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  103. Last year there were anti-mobilization riots in Dagestan: makes me wonder if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict going hot again may have saved Putin from a possible revolt in the Caucasus?
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  104.  @edwxx20001  Hungary would likely be a problem (at least as long as Orbán is still in power) but Turkey not so much, given that Ukrainian entry to NATO would be a major improvement to Turkey's geopolitical position (it would make their Black Sea position far more secure), in a way that Finnish or Swedish entry would not have been.
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  105. Water is arguably a unique commodity because of how much of it we need, especially for agricultural use.
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  106. Most Eastern European countries are highly nationalistic: the revolutions of 1989 weren't so much for democracy as for national liberation from the Kremlin's yoke. Hungary is worse than most because of its language is totally unrelated to that of its neighbours, because Hungary isn't very urbanized (its second-largest city has only 200k people) and because of its resentment at losing so much territory from the Treaty of Trianon.
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  107.  @emigrator08  Jake already calls MTG "Marjorie Traitor Greene". 😉
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  108.  @sanher20  The Croats, Slovenes and Baltic countries always wrote their own languages in Latin script, and Turkey dumped the Arabic script largely because its omission of most vowels makes it unsuited to the Turkish language.
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  109. Although note than 4 Labour MPs in heavily-Muslim districts were defeated by independent candidates running on pro-Palestinian tickets.
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  110.  @simchalebovitch6944  I think this may have been the actual truth.
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  111.  @udikai7799  Ok MAGAt
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  112.  @LMB222  So was Ronald Reagan, who many Americans found to be an inspiring leader.
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  113. Given that it's mostly old military equipment, is the "$60b" what it originally cost to produce (adjusted for inflation), or is it what it would currently be worth if it were sold on the open market?
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  114.  @laars0001  "Солодше нам у бою умирати, як жити в путах, мов німі раби." ("It is sweeter for us to die in battle than to live in chains, like dumb slaves.") - March of Ukrainian Nationalists, 1929
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  115. It was notable that Stalin's gulags were several times deadlier in wartime than they were in peacetime.
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  116.  @ak5659  Oil and gas.
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  117.  @syon600  Unlikely given that Gazans have been stateless since 1948 as the Egyptians (who occupied Gaza between 1948 and 1967) never gave them citizenship. Jordan did give West Bank Palestinians citizenship then, but washed its hands of them in 1970 after the PLO attempted to overthrow the Jordanian monarchy.
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  118.  @martinedwards2004  Ukrainian is more phonetic than Russian, as it doesn't devoice final voiced consonants (unlike most other Slavic languages, or German for that matter), nor does it pronounce an unstressed "o" like an "a".
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  119.  @JakeBroe  Especially as Mariupol is likely embittered enough at Russia that the threat of a Ukrainian suicide bomber (most likely someone who lost their family at Russian hands) is appreciably non-zero.
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  120.  @sagittariusa7662  Are you sure that 20% of the EU's grain consumption comes from the UK (more than from France or Germany)? AFAIK the UK is a big net importer of food (even if not as much as in the early 20th century: we increased our productivity considerably after WWII), even if that is more likely because of its dense population than because of any problem with production.
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  121. ​ @bastianelsenhans6639  Shouldn't that be "Ceterum censeo Moscoviam esse delendam"?
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  122. For that you'd need to build your own steelmaking capacity instead of just exporting your coal and iron ore to China.
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  123.  @Lasse65  Crimea was never an integral part of the Ottoman Empire. It was still the Crimean Khanate (albeit an Ottoman satellite state) 1430-1793, and it was still part of Russia (albeit demilitarized by treaty) 1856-1917.
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  124. I wonder if this mentality is driven by the fundamentally parasitic nature of Moscow itself? Moscow is a freak of geography in that it is a 10+ million metropolitan area that is: * very far north (almost at the 56th parallel) * very far from the sea (about 700 km away) * not located within good quality farmland (Russia's best farmland is far to the south).
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  125. Героям Слава!
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  126.  @hayleyxyz  Lukashenko was originally popular in Belarus thanks to a generous welfare state that was in fact paid for by Russia. In effect the country was a heavily-subsidized propaganda showcase, like Cold War-era Cuba was for the Soviets, or like West Berlin was for NATO. I wonder if Belarusians are now increasingly hostile to the regime, now that it is no longer in a position to fund that welfare state as Russian gas exports to the EU have been slashed.
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  127. The Treaty of Trianon was the one which dismembered Hungary : the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary was broken up by the Treaty of Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
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  128.  @TheBandit7613  Petrostates (a category including both Russia and many Arab countries) tend to be tyrannies because the oil export revenue gives the state tremendous independent power that isn't dependent on collecting taxes from the people.
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  129. If China did invade the Russian Far East, I wonder if the West would greenlight Japan to reclaim Karafuto and Chishima (aka Sakhalin Oblast)?
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  130. Interesting that China claims Sakhalin as theirs: if they were to take back that island wouldn't the Japanese be shitting bricks about the possibility (if China takes Taiwan too) of being practically encircled? Or do you think that in that scenario the West would give Japan a green light to reclaim Karafuto (to use the Japanese name for the island)?
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  131. A lot of them were very well propagandized by Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity.
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  132. ​ @donaldcarey114  I didn't think Versailles was intended to reduce Germany to an agrarian country: aren't you confusing it with the Morgenthau Plan proposed for Germany after WW 2? The Morgenthau Plan was ultimately never carried out because it would likely have resulted in a famine in Germany that would have driven them into the hands of the Soviets, which may well have been the intention of the plan's real author Harry Dexter White, who turned out to be a Soviet mole.
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  133.  @voidtempering8700  The war is currently stalemated because the ground is a sea of mud in the vicinity of the front line.
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  134.  @gregbrogan9061  Sadly I expect the Donbas to be a depopulated wasteland by the time this war is over: the population loyal to Ukraine will have fled west or been murdered by the Russian occupiers, while the population loyal to Russia will have fled east or been expended as conscripted cannon fodder. Elsewhere in eastern and southern mainland Ukraine the population is overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine, and I could even see them gradually abandoning the Russian language, as it has been stigmatized by the war. That leaves Crimea where ethnic Russians actually make a majority: will this war end with the Ukrainians and the West angry enough to consider expelling them to Russia, much as the Sudeten Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia after World War II?
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  135. If they'd REALLY wanted to piss off those cruise ship visitors, they'd have greeted them with "We were born in a great hour", complete with the final call for a Ukraine from the San to the Caucasus. 😉
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  136. I guess the Dutch have a powerful motive: "avenge MH 17!"
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  137. Russia is one of the worst countries in the world as far as divorce and abortion rates are concerned, so it's a strange role model for anyone supposedly concerned with Christian values.
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  138. Americans need to take inspiration from what the Ukrainians did in 2013-4.
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  139. I'm guessing Tucker Carlson was a great propagandist for Putin?
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  140. The Poles have long had a saying "za naszą i waszą wolność" (for our freedom and yours).
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  141.  @robinstevenson6690  Roughly 80% of American women had kids for most of its history, but during the immediate post-WWII years it was more like 98%. There's a reason why the 1950s was obsessed with "juvenile delinquents", and why in the 1960s (once those kids came of age) there was a massive crime wave.
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  142.  @nsevv  "The Russian state is not based on treaties" -- Sergey Kirienko, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration of Russia.
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  143. Artyomovsk (or Artemivsk in Ukrainian) was the town's Soviet-era name, derived from the name of a Bolshevik revolutionary who came from there. It was reverted to Bakhmut in 2016 as part of Ukraine's decommunization program.
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  144.  @williamzk9083  Actually there were separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk (the regions which together comprise the Donbas), but they were mostly killed by the Russians and replaced with their own agents. Although those separatists were dumb in the extreme: sure they were pissed off that their region's sugar-daddy Yanukovych got overthrown, but why would they be under any illusions that Putin's Russia (a kleptocracy let's not forget!) would help them economically? That probably explains though why the separatists were mostly poorly-educated people (USSR-nostalgic old folk, coal miners and especially cops) with the educated population remaining loyal to Ukraine.
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  145.  @adammorris3082  There's no apostrophe in "Nazis" unless you're talking about something belonging to an individual Nazi.
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  146.  @ulrichvonhermann2548  Even now the Swedish language uses the expression "polsk riksdag" ("Polish parliament") as a synonym for "chaos".
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  147. The Hetman vs the Tsar!
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  148.  @Celebmacil  I sometimes wonder also if Finland will regain Karjala, if Ukraine will gain Kuban, or Japan will reclaim Karafuto (= Sakhalin) in the event of a Russian collapse.
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  149.  @OKEAHKPACA-pd1gl  While here in the UK most of our Russia-sympathisers are on the far left (*cough* George Galloway) in many other Western countries (including the US and France) they are predominantly right wing.
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  150.  @ingoditrust7784  That would explain why some political leaders support Russia (although I suspect blackmail is actually more important than bribery). It doesn't explain why millions of ordinary (for example) MAGA Americans would support Russia.
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  151.  @alanmcgowan3457  The Russian name "Sakhalin" derives from Manchu, which suggests that the Qing Dynasty had an (unrealized) claim on the island. The Japanese call the island "Karafuto" which derives from the language of the Ainu, the indigenous people both there and in Hokkaido.
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  152. Didn't the discrediting of Sunni Arab Islamism (as ISIS was destroyed, and as Russia helped Assad finish off the moderate Syrian opposition) help Iran and their Shi'a Axis (Hezbollah and the Houthis) suborn a Hamas that would otherwise have been left friendless?
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  153. Crimea was the Sudetenland of the 21st century, in that it was a territory of the victim state where the aggressor's ethnicity was a majority of the population. If Ukraine wins this war, how likely is it that it will feel compelled to ethnically cleanse Crimea of Russians, just as restored Czechoslovakia passed the Beneš decrees to rid itself of the Sudeten Germans?
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  154.  @debrainwasher  What I don't understand is why no post-2000 Western country saw the rise of a single-issue "ban Chinese goods" political movement.
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  155.  @putin-khuylo_putin-khuylo  Not just a criminal evading arrest, but also Putin's lackey!
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  156.  @planet-karma  I think the issue is that Americans were united against the USSR in the 1950s, while a significant minority of (mostly right-wing) Americans today are sympathetic to Russia. My guess is that they see the Russian petrostate as a defender of their fossil-fuelled lifestyles against the environmentalists.
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  157. The rural Deep South was traditionally an economy based on cheap labor rather than skilled labor, so they didn't exactly invest much in education!
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  158.  @stipe3124  You're explaining where the word "Slav" comes from, while @Dominik2499 was explaining that the word "slave" comes from "Slav" (although that was because medieval Slavs were common prey for Turkic slave traders, not because of the oppressiveness of Slavic governments).
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  159.  @ruks345  Then again, Japan in 1941 attacked the USA and UK despite already being bogged down in a major war in China.
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  160. He thinks 6000 nuclear warheads mean total impunity.
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  161.  @FrikInCasualMode  I suspect one of the first big construction projects for Ukraine once the war is over is to re-gauge their railways to standard gauge.
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  162. I haven't learned that, probably because it didn't fire up my imagination in the way that "March of the New Army" (which I have learned) did.
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  163. There are also Koreans in Sakhalin, who were left over from when (part of) the island was Japan's Karafuto prefecture.
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  164. A double standard based entirely on nuclear blackmail.
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  165.  @sigurdtheblue  I wonder why (other than simple ignorance) young people in particular are more likely to support Russia?
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  166. I ended up teaching myself how to sing the March of Ukrainian Nationalists.
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  167.  @allangibson8494  Maybe @allanhamm5825's native language is German (where the letter Z represents the TS sound)?
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  168.  @TonyM540  Surely it isn't just about money?
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  169.  @anzelmasmatutis2500  Moscow basically believes all the lands of the old Rus' civilization are rightfully theirs. (Although ironically the current Russian-occupied territories of Ukraine are mostly former Khanate of Crimea territories and were never part of Kyivan Rus.)
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  170. I think what you're asking is "why are a large minority of Americans now slavishly loyal to Trump, such that they'd always vote for any Trump-approved candidate in an election"? Not sure how that's a problem with the political system per se...
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  171. And it's unicameral: there is no senate in Ukraine.
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  172.  @dtly50  There's no oil in Afghanistan: the war there was revenge for 9/11.
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  173. I presume reason 2 would also make Russia unwilling to send ammunition trains across the bridge.
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  174. Although Zelensky was a fairly rubbish president before the war AIUI. A bit like Winston Churchill in that respect: much better as a war leader than as a peacetime head of government.
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  175.  @Quetzalcoatl-tq7su  The 1st Reich was more commonly known as the "Holy Roman Empire".
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  176.  @franceyneireland1633  Rural voters are more socially-conservative, authoritarian and populist than urban voters in basically all countries.
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  177.  @Chrisace89  Europe is poorer in natural resources than the US, in part because it is more densely populated and has been industrialized for longer. Germany was Europe's industrial powerhouse, but after 2000 it became very dependent on Russian natural gas, because of a very powerful anti-nuclear-energy movement, plus the fact that pipeline gas is always cheaper than LNG delivered by ship.
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  178.  @ax.f-1256  I'd say Ireland would be an even better example: I imagine even most IRA members spoke English as their first language.
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  179. Nuclear blackmail
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  180. Hitler (fortunately) didn't have nuclear ICBMs.
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  181. Because they fear Russia's nukes.
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  182.  @richardsandy6080  Chamberlain spent much of the early 1930s (as Chancellor) getting the British economy into good enough shape that it could even afford to rearm in the first place.
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  183.  @BTinSF  "The US is not a Parliamentary system for numerous reasons I would not expect the British to understand or agree with." Probably because the Constitution of the United States (and for that matter, the constitutions of most republics in the Americas) pre-dates parliamentary democracy as we know it today.
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  184.  @daneaxe6465  Actually the first capital of Rus wasn't Kyiv but Novgorod, which later on became the capital of an independent republic (which sadly ultimately fell to Moscow). So to me it looks like the problem isn't with (Great) Russians as an ethnicity, but rather with Moscow in particular. Moscow rose to prominence as a brutal kleptocracy serving its Mongol overlords, and likely retained this kleptocratic character even after throwing off the Mongol yoke: it reminds me of how many African lands went from being brutally exploited by white European colonialists, to being brutally exploited by local black kleptocrats (with Mobutu perhaps being one of the most infamous examples of such).
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  185.  @Ghuttenlocke  And English will be his third language given that his mother tongue is Russian.
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  186. Before last year it was normally the North Korean regime that was accused of using Nineteen Eighty-Four as an instruction manual.
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  187. The Russians call Ukrainians Nazis because since the Maidan they've increasingly adopted symbolism associated with Stepan Bandera's Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists: examples being the now-familiar "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes" call-and-response, and the Ukrainian military's adoption of the OUN anthem "We were born in a great hour". What they overlook is that while Bandera collaborated with the Nazis until the Nazis double-crossed him, so did Stalin. And Stalin (leading a powerful state instead of a relatively powerless insurgent movement) had rather less excuse to do so.
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  188.  @nian60  No, Germany's Quisling would be Gerhard Schröder.
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  189.  @JosefMengele-e9f  The weird thing is that right-wing populists in Europe generally haven't even done the job (stopping the migrants) that people voted for them to do! In fact, one of the most effective European governments at limiting third-world immigration was a centre-left government in Denmark.
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  190. Caucuses -- don't you mean Caucasus (Kavkaz)?
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  191. Wasn't the war in 1918 Finland more a left-right civil war (with your grandfather presumably fighting on the right-wing "White" side) than a war of independence against Russia?
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  192. ​ @JacobBax It's ironic though given that the Mongols terrorized the whole of Eurasia in the pre-firearms era.
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  193.  @franceyneireland1633  I think the point is that Russia's big nuclear arsenal means it cannot be totally overrun and occupied like Nazi Germany was in 1945.
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  194. So it would kind of be like a US mid-term Congressional election then.
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  195. Strongly disagree with the "worse than ISIS" claim re Russia: if ISIS had had nuclear weapons they wouldn't have just threatened to use them as Russia is doing, they would have actually used them. Russia's evil ambitions are entirely this-worldly (indeed, they pretty much turned the Russian Orthodox Church into an arm of the state), while ISIS was an apocalyptic death cult seeking to bring about the end of the world. Their propaganda magazine was named "Dabiq" after a location that plays a similar role in Islamic eschatology to that played by "Armageddon" in Christian eschatology. And back in 2008 this end-of-the-world fixation among those who would later become ISIS prompted an Iraqi member of al-Qaeda to approach Osama bin Laden to warn him that "the group was being led by millennarians who were talking all the time about the Mahdi and making strategic decisions based on when they thought the Mahdi was going to arrive". This actually sent in motion the schism between ISIS and al-Qaeda.
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  196. Perhaps we should buy Putin a nice chair, and switch it on once he's sitting comfortably?
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  197.  @michaelrowsell1160  Actually France did have a treaty with Czechoslovakia (the "Little Entente") but Britain didn't.
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  198. Moldova isn't in NATO, so I suspect it would be the next country after Ukraine on Russia's hit list.
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  199. Harris to the White House, Trump to the Big House!
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  200. And the same is true of Netanyahu in Israel, which is how he became beholden to Judeo-Nazis like Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.
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  201.  @Heater-v1.0.0  I think the alternate history that @rambleon2838 was alluding to was "what if Britain and France had stood by the Czechs in 1938?" I can think of at least three ways in which such a decision could have backfired: 1. If the Nazis had somehow managed to conquer France even without the Czech tanks (after all, on paper they shouldn't have been able to do that even with them) then British morale would be a lot shakier if they hadn't first tried bending over backwards for peace (and in doing so, showing to the people why they had to fight). 2. The Soviets could have promised to get involved in defending Czechoslovakia, but they could have just grabbed the Baltic States and western Belarus and Ukraine (just as they did historically with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) while double-crossing Britain and France by leaving them to fight Hitler alone. 3. Perhaps Britain and France could have defeated the Nazis, but in this situation (and given continuing US isolationism) how likely is that this would be just "the German War": a minor prelude to the World War II to come (which would be an attempted Soviet conquest of Europe)? Kind of makes you understand why Neville Chamberlain was desperate to avoid war and play Europe's two totalitarian empires off against one another, until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made that impossible.
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  202. To be honest I don't see what leverage Ukraine has that would allow it to get any territory back without actually taking it back militarily.
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  203. Free Ichkeria, free Dagestan, free Tatarstan, free Bashkortostan and free Buryatia!
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  204.  @pupper5580  Something like that was what the Minsk Agreements were all about: Russia at the time was seeking to smuggle its puppet DPR and LPR back into Ukraine in such a way that they could have veto power over Ukraine's foreign policy (and for example prevent them from joining NATO or the EU).
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  205. I'd be shocked if any significant number of Ukrainians in Canada (as opposed to Ukrainians in Ukraine) were able to speak Russian in the first place!
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  206.  @JakeBroe  Can Bush II and the neocons (with their futile war in Iraq) be blamed in any way for the resurgence of isolationism that MAGA represents?
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  207.  @SkipEtchells  I don't think there was any diplomacy involved when Rome obliterated Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War.
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  208.  @robertmaybeth3434  Russia for now does have its own Black Sea coast, from Anapa thru Novorossiysk to Sochi. Unless the West gets mad enough at Russia's atrocities that it either decides to help fulfill the old OUN dream of a Ukraine "from the San to the Caucasus", or to restore the ancient homeland of the Circassians.
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  209. It probably isn't just about money, but also that they can get away with subjecting illegal immigrant workers to inhumane working conditions.
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  210.  @jimmallamace3027  IIRC the Canadian government specifically encouraged Ukrainians to settle in the prairie provinces, perhaps figuring that being from a similar climate they'd know how to properly cultivate the land.
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  211.  @guardsman2018  To me, a lot of the support for Russia in the global South has a (bastardizing Karl Marx) "natural resource exporters of the world, unite!" vibe to it.
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  212. A few English words have the Zh sound: the S in "measure" for example.
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  213. Because Israel's enemies don't have nukes.
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  214. ​ @lindax911 The only sort-of developed country that seems to be having lots of kids these days is Israel -- I wonder why that is?
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  215.  @Litt-g3p  I can't imagine that Jake Broe was that influential in Israel.
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  216.  @slezerpezer  Joe Biden did a great judo move by hanging on (and thus convincing Trump he had an easy win ahead) for just long enough for Trump to end up with (I wouldn't say "pick" as I think he was more the pick of Putin and Thiel) JD Vance as his running mate: a candidate who has essentially no appeal outside the existing MAGA base.
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  217.  @WalnutWarrior7  The complication is that pointing out that the USSR started WWII together with Nazi Germany might be used to argue that Poland should regain its lost eastern territories, and the Ukrainians (et al) who live there now certainly wouldn't be happy with that. (Indeed, pre-war Poland had a problem with Ukrainian terrorists, who amongst other things assassinated their Interior Minister.) The equivalent situation for Finland would be if Karelia had become independent after the fall of the USSR.
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  218.  @peterhoulihan9766  Well Ireland isn't really one to talk given that they don't even have a real military.
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  219.  @peterhoulihan9766  More precisely you don't engage in wars of choice (a good thing) and rely on the UK's military to protect you against aggressors (a not-so-good thing).
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  220.  @paulmakinson1965  Even before the Mongol invasions the principality of Vladimir Suzdal (Muscovy's predecessor) was already noticeably more autocratic than either Kyivan Rus or Novgorod, so perhaps Muscovite despotism isn't the fault of the Mongols after all?
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  221. Also disagree that Ukraine is likely to abandon the Cyrillic alphabet: they've likely been using it longer than the Muscovites have, and we already have an EU and NATO member (Bulgaria) that uses Cyrillic. I do expect that all the Turkic nations of central Asia will complete their switch to Latin though, and perhaps even Western languages will dump the Russian-derived spelling "Kazakhstan" in favour of the native "Qazaqstan".
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  222. While a fast breeder reactor does run on U-238 once the reaction is going, it does still need a fissile charge to start the reaction in the first place. Although I would have believed that the best material for such a start charge would be the fissile material the reactor normally burns (ie plutonium-239) rather than U-235. Just as for a thorium-cycle breeder reactor the most appropriate start charge would be uranium-233.
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  223. So you think Ukraine are aiming to play (on a smaller scale) the role the Soviets played in Stalingrad, hoping to hold out until their new Western kit enables them to carry out an equivalent of the Uranus offensive?
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  224.  @klubberzvonhatzenbuhl563  And in this battle (unlike Stalingrad) the city is mostly on the defender's side of the river.
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  225.  @Burglecutter  He has appeared on RT news in the past.
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  226.  @davidbilich1708  Where it belongs.
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  227. Don't high interest rates help kill off zombie companies of this kind though, as what makes a company a zombie is usually being heavily in debt such that most of its operating profits are spent on paying the interest on the debt.
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  228. "Every billionaire is a policy failure"
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  229.  @riparianlife97701  They still wouldn't have anything on UPA fighter Ilya Oberyshyn, who went into hiding after the end of World War II and only re-emerged in 1991 after the fall of the USSR.
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  230. The Nazis didn't have nuclear ICBMs.
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  231. Which UK politicians do you see as supporting Russia? (Other than George Galloway of course.)
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  232.  @MetalBeastShred  By promising cheap oil and gas from Russia?
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  233. Or at least as soon as they've retaken enough land in the south to bring the bridge within range of their aircraft or missiles.
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  234. Probably because of the US's own war crimes in places like Iraq.
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  235. Aren't the big business profits more to be found in equipment for the Navy and Air Force though, with Army spending being mainly personnel salaries?
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  236. ​ @georgeprout42  I think the issue is more to do with the pre-2014 ethnic Russian population, not post-2014 colonists. And the Russian soldiers are stealing washing machines more because they want them to wash their own clothes (due to their army's inadequate field hygiene provisions), not because they don't have washing machines back in Russia.
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  237.  @lewisdoherty7621  How do you think history would have been different if Poroshenko had defeated Zelensky and won a second term as Ukrainian President?
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  238. That's related to a misconception about how kompromat works. Russia doesn't (usually) kompromize people already elected to public office: what they do is kompromize men in their early 20s who are interested in politics, and then help them into public office. Only a few of the kompromized men end up in public office: most are used to help said few advance through the power structure. It's like Operation Black Buck where it took a dozen Victor tankers to get a single Vulcan bomber to the target.
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  239.  @glennfitzroy4352  I'm honestly surprised that someone who's been following this war as avidly as Jake has doesn't yet know how to read Cyrillic script.
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  240. Taking the rest of the Black Sea coast as far as the Georgian border seems like the highest priority, so that Russia can no longer threaten to starve the Middle East or Africa with a Black Sea blockade.
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  241.  @Silveirias  Makes me think of that Reddit map from 2014 of a Russia broken up into 30 countries, in which Finland was roughly doubled in size, Ukraine had gained the Kuban and the whole of Sakhalin Oblast had become Japanese territory.
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  242.  @Silveirias  So basically the pre-Winter War borders then?
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  243. B-52s were great for pounding enemies like the Taliban with minimal anti-air capability, but would be no match for Russian air defences: there's a reason why the skies over Ukraine are basically ruled by missiles and drones. The only thing that would really be a game-change for Ukraine in the air war is if they were supplied with F-35s or other stealth aircraft, which realistically isn't going to happen.
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  244. You mean the plan is to sucker Putin into putting as many forces as possible in those border oblasts (thinking they're safe) and then letting Ukraine hit them?
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  245.  @telebubba5527  "Соборна Українськая держава Вільна й міцна, від Сяну по Кавказ " https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R7MTG-rGCo
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  246. Trump is Putin's puppet, possibly because Putin has copies of the photos of Trump raping children at Jeffrey Epstein's island.
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  247. Microcontrollers, which are also used in most modern weapons, and which Russia can no longer import due to sanctions.
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  248.  @billwilliams9023  What are you on about: are you a Lukashenka loyalist?
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  249.  @koma-k I think it is more that it reinforces existing authoritarian regimes: how many absolute monarchies -- other than Eswatini and (de facto) North Korea -- still exist that aren't Gulf Arab oil states?
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  250. And the fact that none of the women are wearing hijab (despite Derbent being a heavily Muslim city) is also evidence that the crowd is faked.
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  251. ​ @Anna87147  Crimea is this war's "Sudetenland": a territory of a victim state where the aggressor's ethnicity was a majority of the population. That's probably one reason why the West's reaction to 2014 was relatively mild, just as how appeasement of Hitler in 1938 had mainstream support. (It does make me wonder though if a Ukrainian victory will result in the expulsion of the Crimean Russians, comparable to how the Sudeten Germans were expelled under the Beneš decrees.) Incidentally, given that the Ukrainian territory currently occupied by Russia (except Luhansk) roughly corresponds to the old Khanate of Crimea, and was taken by imperial Russia at roughly the same time, how did different places within it end up so different demographically? Kherson and Zaporizhzhia are overwhelmingly ethnic-Ukrainian, Donetsk is majority ethnic-Ukrainian but has a large ethnic-Russian minority, while Crimea proper is majority ethnic-Russian.
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  252. Party like it's 1853!
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  253. Smert' Voroham!
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  254.  @j_117  Any American who lives in a safe Republican district ought to register as a Republican, so they can vote against any pro-Russia traitor candidate in the primary.
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  255. I'd call a return to 1991 borders just a "win": for me "total win" would be Ukraine sharing a land border with Georgia.
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  256. I thought the title of old Ukrainian rulers was "Hetman"?
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  257.  @oeokosko  Part of Poland you mean, which is what fuelled the Polish-Ukrainian enmity of the era. Although that seems to have ended as early as 1946, when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army joined forces with Polish Home Army remnants to attack the Bolsheviks at Hrubieszów in eastern Poland.
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  258. Isn't BASF in the process of dismantling its entire chemical complex in Germany (as the high gas prices have made it unviable) in order to rebuild it in Louisiana?
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  259. When I heard about Russia's plan last year to use a Black Sea blockade to cause a famine in the Middle East (presumably to flood Europe with starving Muslim refugees) it made me wonder if Russia should be cut out of the Black Sea altogether: aka the Ukraine "from the San to the Caucasus" that concludes the song "March of Ukrainian Nationalists".
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  260.  @paulsutton5896  Imagine extending Ukraine to the south east so that it bordered Georgia...
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  261. I doubt the Ukrainians would be able to totally destroy the Kadyrovites: if they suffer bad enough losses wouldn't they just be sent back to Chechnya to prevent the territory trying to break free of Russia again?
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  262. What pro-Israel propaganda? Didn't see any in this video...
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  263.  @robm.4512  I didn't really support it either, thinking "she's our scumbag, our problem" more or less, plus I'm concerned that the decision would have a chilling effect on ethnic minorities in the UK more generally.
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  264.  @tanyaroberson9629  Even if Russia is conventionally a paper tiger, it still has the world's biggest nuclear arsenal.
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  265. ​ @sharkdegrijze  "March of the New Army" is of course a modern version of We Were Born in a Great Hour...
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  266.  @sharkdegrijze  Which version are you listening to? The original version from 1929 has 6 stanzas, while "March of the New Army" has 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists
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  267.  @aaronbaker2186  Turkey too is still effectively the rump of the Ottoman Empire, which is why it still has a Kurdish problem to this day.
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  268. Hope for a WWIII in the late 1940s (before the Soviets had deliverable nukes of their own) is likely what motivated UPA to keep fighting for so long after the defeat of the Nazis.
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  269.  @JakeBroe  As evil as the Nazis or (gasp!) even worse?
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  270. Doesn't "c" in all Latin-script Slavic languages represent the "ts" sound?
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  271.  @ericpeterson7512  Wasn't Sicily liberated a year before the Normandy beaches were stormed: 1943 as opposed to 1944?
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  272.  @JakeBroe  I often feel glum that being born in 1980 puts me in the ass-end of Generation X.
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  273. A good temporary measure, but in the long term I'd prefer it between Russia and a free Belarus. ⬜🟥⬜
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  274.  @RedJadeArt  The British certainly believed Ireland was overpopulated and encouraged emigration (I've amended my original comment accordingly), but I not sure what the British government could have done differently. UK government debt in 1847 was 140% of GDP (due to the enormous borrowing to pay for the Napoleonic Wars), and a quarter of the government's budget was being spent on famine relief. The Whigs were a minority government (dependent on the Peelites) and were unable to get enough votes to increase income tax, while an attempt to borrow $8m to pay for famine relief caused a double financial crisis with interest rates spiking from 3.5% to 8%: the highest the BoE base rate had been since 1694. Chancellor Charles Wood was thus forced to cut spending, and the Irish paid the price.
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  275. The main economic problem with Russia is that Moscow is an absolutely shitty location for a city of 12 million people: hundreds of miles from the sea, a local river that doesn't lead to the ocean (but to the inland Caspian Sea at Astrakhan), close to 56 degrees North, and on forest soil that is very poor quality for farming. All these factors make it very expensive to run, which is why it bleeds the rest of Russia dry.
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  276. They've still got to cross the whole width of Ukraine to get to the front line: Ukraine is a big country!
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  277.  @laars0001 It worked very well for Russia back in the old days when they had huge families, but not today when their birth rate (like most of Europe's) is sub-replacement.
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  278.  @laars0001  Well I've had since childhood a dominoes set that is Made in USSR, but I guess that's not quite the same thing.
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  279. I'm sure the NAFO guys would take offense at someone calling Orban a "fella"!
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  280.  @beth7935  I guess Hangul is more difficult that Cyrillic, because Cyrillic and Latin share a common ancestor in Greek. About 15 years ago I did also use the "Muslim Kid School" videos to teach myself Arabic script.
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  281. Israel is also surrounded by enemies, and for far less self-inflicted reasons.
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  282. I'm also thinking of the gigantic waves in Lake Superior that sank the SS Edmund Fitzgerald.
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  283. Unfortunately Russia can't be starved out as it's essentially self-sufficient in food now: one of the few real economic achievements of Putin's government was to fix Russian agriculture.
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  284. Old Rus' (whether based in Kyiv or in the even older Novgorod) was a civilization which developed along the river routes connecting Scandinavia to the Black Sea (and thus to Constantinople). While Muscovy (and Central Russia more generally) isn't part of that system of rivers: they're isolated from ocean-going international trade because they're in the Volga river basin, and the Volga leads not to the ocean but to the landlocked Caspian Sea: OK if you want to go to Iran but no good for most of the rest of the world. This lack of access to the ocean may be what set up Russia to be at odds with western civilization.
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  285.  @mikaelkarlsson2724Mikemike  Isn't the Finnish word for Sweden "Ruotsi"?
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  286. I'd prefer to say "Mike Johnson gave them it"!
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  287. ​ @Massive_the_Composer  Downing a bridge requires a considerably larger warhead than sinking a warship, because warships need to carry large amounts of explosive materials onboard as part of their function.
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  288. Actually I think the logic of tankie socialists is rather different: they hold the Leninist belief that the Western working classes tolerate capitalism because they've been bought off with cheap resources from non-western countries (including Russia, but mainly countries in the global south), and the way to bring about a socialist revolution in the West is to empower anti-Western regimes in those countries. They don't care exactly what kind of regimes they are, as long as they cut off the flow of resources.
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  289.  @maxpower3990  One thing that really helped the Nazis was Hjalmar Schacht's financial chicanery that allowed them to keep much of their re-armament expenditure off the books, for example with the "MEFO bills" scheme.
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  290. Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy were the two powers of Eastern Europe that were able to expand as the Golden Horde disintegrated in the 16th century. The only remnant of the Horde that survived for a while was the Khanate of Crimea, whose lands roughly corresponded to current Russian-occupied Ukraine.
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  291. Russia has the oldest leadership of any post-Soviet country, while Ukraine has the youngest.
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  292. If you're looking for a WWII-era Brit to liken to MTG then I'd suggest Oswald Mosley. Neville Chamberlain was more of a fall guy, dealt a bad hand by the poor state of the British economy during the 1920s and '30s.
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  293. Slightly larger actually.
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  294. 🟥🦁☀🟩
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  295. And Crimea (being majority Russian in population) was very much analogous to the Sudetenland in 1938.
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  296. Anti-immigration.
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  297.  @CMY187  Just as we dumped the Russian spellings Kiev, Lvov, Kharkov for the native Kyiv, Lviv and Kharkiv, maybe we should also start referring to Qazaqstan instead of Kazakhstan?
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  298. No, Donald Quisling Trump! Chamberlain was just looking to buy time to re-arm.
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  299.  @pynn1000  Russian has и and ы but not і, Ukrainian has і and и but not ы, and Belarusian has і and ы but not и. Belarusian also has the letter ў which no other language uses.
    2
  300. If you wanted to wipe out semiconductors across a huge area (and especially satellites) wouldn't the way to do it be to set off a hydrogen bomb just above the Earth's atmosphere?
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  301.  @zhukie  Is their fear something like "if Russia breaks apart then China gets to gobble up the pieces"?
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  302. Check the news.
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  303. Japan only currently claims the four southernmost Kuril Islands (aka the Northern Territories) but I suspect that if China did take Outer Manchuria then the rest of the Kurils (aka Chishima) along with Sakhalin itself (aka Karafuto) would come into play.
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  304. ​ @florete2310 Dailymotion perhaps? They're French IIRC.
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  305.  @donaldcarey114  Actually IIRC Crimea's population was majority ethnic-Russian even prior to the 2014 annexation (although as you say Russia will have manipulated the demographics even more in their favour since then), which is why I doubt even now that Russian servicemen and their families are the predominant part of the population. Kaliningrad would be another story though.
    2
  306. From which year? During the Middle Ages France was smaller than it is today, but during the Napoleonic era it was of course larger.
    2
  307.  @GannDolph I don't understand why Republicans would be hostile to Venezuelan refugees: as refugees from a left-wing tyranny (like the Cuban exiles six decades earlier) wouldn't they be likely Republican voters if they became citizens?
    2
  308. The Nazi song is called "Es zittern die morschen Knochen"
    2
  309.  @martinedwards2004  I thought the Cyrillic alphabet started in Bulgaria as the Bulgarians would have been the first Slavic people encountered by Orthodox missionaries?
    2
  310. Why isn't a jet-propelled kamikaze weapon like the Palianytsia described as a cruise missile rather than a drone?
    2
  311.  @Stepbacktrey  Was your great-grandfather in the OUN or UPA? (And do you think those organizations will come to be viewed more sympathetically in the west because of Putin's war?)
    2
  312. Perhaps because democracies aren't very good at nuclear blackmail?
    2
  313. Or (better) Free Ichkeria, Dagestan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva, Buryatia, Sakha, etc
    2
  314.  @lineage13  I can understand why Greece wants powerful military forces given their rivalry with Turkey, but why would Spain need so many tanks?
    2
  315.  @allinoneal4540  It's dark blue actually: I guess this is the older version of the French flag? The French flag today more often uses a brighter shade of blue that matches that of the EU flag.
    2
  316. IIRC hypersonic missiles were originally envisaged for use to destroy aircraft carriers.
    2
  317.  @JakeBroe Indeed: the Germans called it Wandel durch Handel (change through trade).
    2
  318. "Third Rome" was coined centuries before "Third Reich" though.
    2
  319.  @Michael-vp9gs  I also note how a lot of Republicans speak of "President Trump" when he's not currently President.
    2
  320. It isn't accurate about the current border crisis though: that crisis (like the UK's with small boats crossing the Channel) is about asylum seekers, not the more traditional kind of illegal immigrant who comes to the country to work while hiding from the authorities.
    2
  321. Here's my favourite one: it has subtitles transliterated into Latin script if you want to try learning it (I did!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R7MTG-rGCo
    2
  322. So much for "Своих Не Бросаем"!
    2
  323.  @p0gr  I think it's really the entire MAGA faction that's to blame, not just Mike Johnson personally.
    2
  324. Isn't the problem is that there are way too many people supporting genocide on both sides: Hamas on the Palestinian side, and the Kahanists in Netanyahu's cabinet on the Israeli side?
    2
  325. Neville Chamberlain, not Joseph.
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  326.  @danieljames2015  I'd say "culture" rather than "creed" to be honest, as the main reason why the ex-Caliphate lands (roughly everything from Morocco to Pakistan) are dysfunctional is because of the prevalence of father's-brother's-daughter marriages, which splinters the population into self-contained clans at odds with one another. Muslim countries outside this zone (such as Turkey, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia) don't have this marriage pattern and are therefore a lot more functional.
    2
  327.  @murphy7801  I definitely think the UK economy is in really bad shape (even if "failed state" is a bit over-dramatic). The problem is that we've run a current account deficit for pretty much the entire period since 1973 (and it got dramatically worse after the turn of the millennium) which has resulted in foreigners taking over our economy. Brexit was an outburst of nationalist rage resulting from this, as well as by the fact that many economic sectors had chosen to rely on immigrant labour: locals are locked out either because they are viewed as lazy, or because the people doing the hiring are themselves immigrants who hire only their co-nationals.
    2
  328. Most likely he bought it second-hand from the Chinese.
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  329. Because Russia has a massive nuclear arsenal?
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  330.  @davidhowse884 I was disappointed that this scale categorized Ukraine as a hybrid regime: I'd have thought it was at least a flawed democracy.
    2
  331.  @derektighe5131  I thought the people of Transnistria were roughly a third Russian, a third Ukrainian and a third Moldovan?
    2
  332.  @robs257  In fact the word "Caesar" in Latin was pronounced almost the same as the German "Kaiser": nothing like how "Caesar" is pronounced in English today!
    2
  333. I wonder whether he thinks Russia ought to lose any of its existing territories, with the following being the most obvious possibilities: * Karelia (to Finland) * Kaliningrad (to Poland, Lithuania and/or Germany) * Kuban (to Ukraine) * Sakhalin and the Kurils (to Japan)
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  334. The fact that a lot of people on Russia's side refer to Bakhmut as "Artyomovsk" -- a name only adopted in 1924 and derived from a nickname of one of the leading Bolsheviks -- show how superficial the supposed de-communization of today's Russian Federation really is.
    2
  335.  @istvanglock7445  First of all "antisemitism" (and its opposite "philosemitism" for that matter) should be un-hyphenated as there's no such thing as "semitism". (While hyphenation would be correct for terms like "anti-communism" or "anti-capitalism".) Secondly the way that "antisemitism" refers to bigotry against Jews (even though most actual Semites are Arabs) reminds me of "conventional current" flowing from positive to negative in an electric circuit (even though electrons actually flow from negative to positive): it's a factually-incorrect term that's too well-established to change.
    2
  336. Actually it stands for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик, which translates as "USSR" in English.
    2
  337. Isn't the Sarmat explosion yet another illustration of the dangers of hypergolic rocket fuels? (Perhaps that's why the US ICBM force decided to go only for solid-fuel Minuteman missiles?)
    2
  338. It's Vo-RO-nezh (zh is the "g" in "barrage"), not Vo-RENZ!
    2
  339. He underestimated the impact of right-wing propaganda on social media, especially X, TikTok and also YouTube.
    2
  340.  @incognitotorpedo42  Or better, challenge the pro-Russian Republicans in primary elections!
    2
  341.  @zlatkoraic  And which Georgia: the US state or the Caucasian country?
    2
  342. Although one place name Jake always seems to get wrong is the Russian city of Voronezh, which he pronounces "Vorenz".
    2
  343. Is Putin afraid of a Russian von Stauffenberg?
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  344.  @sej8806  If it's not British then who's is it?
    2
  345. Wasn't US caution in Vietnam driven by fear that China would enter the war (much like it had done in Korea)?
    2
  346. Australia's anti-nuclear-power stance is partly because of influential individuals (Helen Caldicott being one), and partly because of its powerful coal lobby.
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  347. The cruiser Moskva was built in Mykolaiv by Ukrainians during the USSR, and would ultimately be sunk by an independent Ukraine.
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  348.  @Elaud  Which doesn't sound Ukrainian at all: Tatar?
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  349. Moldova and Georgia could also really use NATO membership...
    2
  350. Perhaps they say it's only a colonial war if you have to cross the sea?
    2
  351. Let's replace them with India.
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  352. I prefer "Putin is enticed by weakness, not provoked by strength".
    2
  353. So is why is he wasting so many troops on constant attacks, instead of digging in and defending until Trump saves his bacon?
    2
  354. I think it's US$110 to get a patch: note the amounts will change on the help99 site if you change currency.
    2
  355. Isn't it the case that aggressors were hardly ever defeated directly by economic sanctions, but more often the effect of the sanctions was to force them to dramatically escalate the war in a way which made their defeat inevitable? This happened with Germany in World War I, when it responded to the British naval blockade with unrestricted submarine warfare, which dragged America into the war, thus guaranteeing Germany's defeat. It also happened with Japan in World War II: America cut off Japan's oil supply in protest at Japanese atrocities in China, and Japan's response was try to conquer its way to the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. This was expected to draw in the US Pacific Fleet (because the American-occupied Phillipines stood between Japan and the Dutch East Indies), hence the attack on Pearl Harbor...
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  356. Do you think Western powers were reluctant to see the Ukrainians use their weapons against Russian territory not because they feared how Russia might respond, but because they feared how China might respond (ie put its gigantic industrial machine behind Russia's war effort)?
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  357.  @wellnessences  You can also note that at the Nuremberg trials the Soviets tried their damnedest to get the UPA classified as Nazi collaborators, but they didn't succeed.
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  358. So like becoming an "outlaw" in a medieval society then?
    2
  359. I think Jake is referring to now, not during what we must now call "Cold War I".
    2
  360. Like your avatar!
    2
  361. Perhaps because the ethnic Poles were a minority in the Soviet half of pre-war Poland: most of its population was Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians.
    2
  362. Heinrich Heine
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  363. Trump hates "losers", and the fall last month of Putin's lackey in Damascus has likely convinced him that Putin is a loser.
    2
  364.  @kkaka26  Why would NATO troops be pivotal re Russia's decision to nuke or not to nuke?
    2
  365. Yup -- that's something a lot of people forget about the Korean War, that most of the war was essentially against the Chinese.
    2
  366.  @whyisdiscostevetaken  UK shops are more metric than Canadian ones IIRC, but the UK still uses miles (and yards!) on its highway signs.
    2
  367.  @johnhopkins6260  How exactly can you force the unconditional surrender of a country with thousands of nuclear ICBMs?
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  368. At least between 1948 and 1967 the West Bank Palestinians were citizens of Jordan, but the PLO threw that away in 1970 when they tried to take over Jordan.
    2
  369.  @BeerLeagueGoalieGodfather  Mega yachts that will end up worthless: who exactly would buy a Russian oligarch's yacht (even if there was no war or sanctions) other than another Russian oligarch?
    2
  370. If you're referring to the "October Revolution" of 1917, remember that that actually happened in November according to the western calendar!
    2
  371. Originally the terms were about Cold War geopolitics: 1st World was the Western Bloc, 2nd World was the Eastern Bloc, and 3rd World was the countries not aligned with either side.
    2
  372.  @Kath-nd6pj  The treaty of Montreux only allows Turkey to control whether or not warships can come in or out of the Black Sea: it doesn't allow them to discriminate between countries.
    2
  373.  @migBdk  I'd also blame Bush and the neocons, as their war in Iraq failed to make the Middle East safe for Israel (as it was intended to do) and led to the isolationist backlash that Trump represents.
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  374.  @Wilko11  Australia's immigration policy (much like Canada's) isn't designed to limit overall numbers so much as to exclude uneducated immigrants who would be a burden on society (the famous "points system").
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  375.  @xcrockery8080  I presume that by "pro-genocide" you mean anti-Israel: are you advocating that Australia (and presumably other Western countries) should explicitly ban Muslim immigration?
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  376. I don't think Hitler really believed that any state had a reason to exist beyond "might makes right". He was basically a fundamentalist Social Darwinist, which is why in March 1945 (when it was clear the war was lost) he ordered the complete destruction of Germany itself with his "Nero Order". In his eyes only the Master Race deserved to survive, and that clearly wasn't the Germans because they'd lost the war...
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  377. Albania has never been in Russia's sphere of influence since the Sino-Soviet split (it sided then with China). Did you by any chance mean Abkhazia there?
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  378. ​ @ingabaranauskiene5889 More they were suckered like Neville Chamberlain in 1938: Crimea is majority ethnic Russian.
    2
  379.  @rexsceleratorum1632  Or maybe Spanish and Portuguese?
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  380. It was the Aral Sea that the Soviets turned into a wasteland (by diverting the incoming river water to irrigate cotton crops), not the Caspian Sea.
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  381. I see another Russian warship (the large landing ship Caesar Kunikov) is now at the bottom of the Black Sea where it belongs...
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  382. Слава Нації! Смерть Ворогам!
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  383. Actually "czarina" or even "tsarina" isn't a word in Russian: the feminine of tsar is tsaritsa . Although after 1721 Russian monarchs were styling themselves as Imperator or (if female) Imperatritsa -- these words are derived from the same Latin root as the English words Emperor/Empress.
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  384. More accurately it's that Russia is a civilization-state that feels itself entitled to rule all the Slavonic civilizational sphere (roughly, all the lands where people use Cyrillic script).
    2
  385. During the Great Recession I used to sing that chorus whenever I heard the news that another retail chain had gone into adminstration (the British equivalent of Chapter 11).
    2
  386. It's "Rasputitsa" actually, although given that's a Russian word maybe we should think of switching to the Ukrainian equivalent "Bezdorizhzhiya"?
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  387. The North Korean army was basically beaten before the end of 1950, but China entered the war and bailed them out.
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  388.  @The_ZeroLine  Plus the autocratic culture of Moscow is sometimes said to have been inherited from its predecessor the Principality of Vladimir-Suzdal.
    2
  389. Bought, or kompromized?
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  390. And the next goal after that should be to get off Chinese manufactures!
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  391. India's position in today's alliance system is similar to that of Russia's during the Dreikaiserbund of late 19th-century Europe. The collapse of the Dreikaiserbund created the bipolar Europe of World War I with the UK, France and Russia facing off against Germany and Austria. Similarly if today's India was to abandon Russia and go all-in with the West the result would be a new bipolar world order, with the US, EU, UK, Japan, South Korea, India and Saudi Arabia on one side, facing off against China, Russia, Iran and North Korea on the other.
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  392. I'm not convinced that a Ukrainian flag over Sevastopol would cure Russia's imperial fever though: perhaps it would have to be a Ukrainian flag over Krasnodar, or even Sochi? "Соборна Українськая держава — Вільна й міцна, від Сяну по Кавказ!"
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  393. Actually the main reason why India has used Russian weapons historically is that the Russians allowed India to copy their weapon designs to be produced in India.
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  394. For too long the West believed that peer-level wars had been consigned to the history books by nuclear weapons and/or globalization, and thus allowed their ability to mass-produce stuff like artillery shells to atrophy.
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  395. Given that Transnistria (as its name suggests) is on the Ukrainian side of the Dniestr river, it would be easier (once they could spare the troops of course) for the Ukrainians to destroy their forces (naturally with Moldova's consent)...
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  396. Slava Nacii 🇺🇦 Smert' Voroham 🇺🇦
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  397.  @robm.4512  I'm particularly worried about Michigan, given that Biden 's support for Israel has almost certainly cost him the Muslim vote. (While Muslims of course won't vote for Trump, I expect a lot of them will abstain or vote Green this November.)
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  398.  @Mountain_Lake_Adventures  Most global South countries aren't supportive of Ukraine: the ones which are commodity exporters are coining it in thanks to the shortages caused by Russia's war, while the ones that aren't are desperately poor and could really use some discounted Russian oil, gas or (stolen from Ukraine) grain.
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  399. Boris Johnson (then British PM) used that exact phrase in one of his early speeches during this war in Ukraine. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/prime-minister-boris-johnsons-address-to-the-ukrainian-parliament-3-may-2022
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  400. It's the March of Ukrainian Nationalists: dunno if any of Jake's earlier videos included that tune.
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  401. I'd say the Sudetenland equivalent in this war was Crimea rather than Ukraine as a whole.
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  402. Looks like Russia has just stepped up the nuclear blackmail by carrying out the first ever ICBM attack on an enemy target (the city of Dnipro).
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  403. When Jake suggested that all the participants in this propaganda video had gone through quarantine, it made me think of that "Wuhan pool party" video from 2020 which the Chinese used to brag about their victory over Covid, which I believe was likely the same kind of deal only on a much larger scale.
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  404. Given that Jake is a former missileer, I wonder if he was taught about the impact that the Coriolis effect has on the trajectories of ballistic missiles?
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  405. I think the word is "kompromat".
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  406. How long before we hear names like Petsamo, Viipuri and Toyohara come back into use?
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  407. You're suggesting that Russian aggression may cause the UN to go the same way as the old League of Nations?
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  408. YouTube deleted the audio of the singing Ukrainian soldier for reasons of copyright. :(
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  409.  @pupper5580  I'd still say the old League of Nations was fundamentally weaker because: 1) the United States was never a member, and 2) much of the world was under colonial rule at the time.
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  410.  @mr.meatsoup5639  Muscovy's economy was always dependent on exporting raw materials, but originally they were hunted (fur pelts) rather than mined. They expanded eastwards following the rivers in pursuit of fur, much as Canada expanded westwards for the same reason.
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  411. The last one should be spelled "Ceaușescu".
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  412. Didn't he once appear in Congress in an IDF uniform in spite of never having served in the IDF?
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  413. I'd have thought Jake (along with much of his viewership) would be able to read Cyrillic script (possibly in both Russian and Ukrainian variants) by now.
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  414.  @TheOmegaXicor  You can vote for pro-Ukraine candidates in the primary and still vote Democrat in the general. And if Trump loses in either the primary or (more likely) the general it won't matter what spin he puts on Republican losses in congress, because his age and state of health (or criminal indictments) will almost certainly stop him from running in 2028.
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  415. If Trump did support Ukraine he'd be facing life in prison after Putin released the Epstein kompromat on him.
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  416.  @HarryR1  Zelensky: "I need ammunition, not a ride!"
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  417.  @michaeldunham3385  Specifically he won on an anti-Muslim ticket.
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  418. Isn't the Don the other river you're thinking of?
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  419. Героям Слава!
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  420. Especially given that in a future war Russia's economy would be tightly coupled with China's and thus less vulnerable to western sanctions...
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  421. Shades of Germany's offensive of Spring 1918, which they saw as their last chance to win the war before the Yanks would arrive and swamp them.
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  422. I suggest Zelenskyy should deliberately share some unimportant data with Trump just to see if it is leaked to Russia.
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  423. Why would Putin give back any Ukrainian territories in negotiations if Ukraine wasn't able to take them back by force?
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  424.  @annabelvnoucek2148  Yes, the EU did provide financial assistance to deprived areas of the UK, but it wasn't anything like enough -- what would actually be needed is more on the scale of what West Germany spent on East Germany after reunification. In fact there seems to be a problem with the EU as a whole in that its industrial base (and the jobs that go with it) have become increasingly concentrated in Germany since the introduction of the Euro. And while I do think a certain kind of Leave voter (specifically self-employed "white van man" types) were directly economically harmed by Eastern European immigration, I also think more Britons were spooked by Merkel's decision to allow vast numbers of Syrian refugees into Germany, and were anxious that a lot of them would ultimately end up in the UK. I've even often thought that the UK's EU membership was really doomed on New Years' Eve 2015 with the mass sex attacks in Cologne, especially when many Britons were already primed by the grooming gang scandals to stereotype male Muslims as sexual predators.
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  425. I don't believe that ignorance is what really drive supporters of Trump and other right-wing demagogues.
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  426.  @geretstarseeker453  I'd say it was more a case of The Sea versus The Land: islands and peninsulas are easier to defend than inland territories, and navies foster democracy (look at how even uneducated thugs on board pirate ships evolved a rudimentary form of democracy) in a way which armies do not. * The Romans could "decimate" a wayward legion, but such harsh measures aren't an option at sea, as a ship's entire viability is in jeopardy if it loses 10% of its crew. * If an army captain's cruelty provokes a mutiny he can flee to his superiors, while a naval captain in a similar situation would better be a good swimmer. * If an army captain orders his troops to retreat without higher authorization, he can easily be punished by other captains or the general, while a disobedient naval captain can become a pirate. * The technical knowledge needed to operate ships means there's less scope for cronyism in navies than there is in armies.
    2
  427.  @popscratchie3985  The Ukrainian Insurgent Army carried on fighting the Soviets well into the 1950s even though they had no foreign allies at all.
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  428.  @robinstevenson6690  They were also heavily propagandized in that direction by older generations who had been traumatized by the Great Depression and WWII. Plus, it was a great time for the (white) American working class, which thanks to WWII (plus an anti-immigration policy going back to the 1920s) was facing almost no foreign competition.
    2
  429.  @EEX97623  1993 was also arguably the year in which the hope of Russia becoming a democracy died, as it was when Boris Yeltsin ordered the shelling of the Russian Parliament.
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  430. Another argument for why it's unlikely that the real Putin visited Mariupol, is that surely it's a place where enough people have been embittered enough by Russia did to the city (and who possibly lost their family and thus have nothing left to lose) that becoming a suicide bomber may look like an attractive option? After all, one of the first victims of suicide bombing was Russian Tsar Alexander II, back in 1881.
    2
  431. Perhaps we should call them Qazaqs now, as that is how they spell the name of their people in their own language. "Kazakh" is transliterated from the Russian: Russian (like English) lacks the separate Q sound, and they couldn't use "Kazak" as that means Cossack in Russian. (Our word "Cossack" likely derives from the Ukrainian "Kozak".)
    2
  432.  @pouncepounce7417  The threat that Trump (or some other leader) would take the US back into isolationism isn't the only reason why Europe needs to be able to defend itself: there's also the fact that America will need to use its whole power (and a bunch of allies) to contain China in the Pacific, and likely won't have anything to spare for Europe.
    2
  433. Isn't the U in Rutte a front vowel like German ü?
    2
  434. How much do you think support for Russia by SA (and other African countries) is a case of OPEC-like solidarity between countries that export natural resources?
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  435. A kompromized traitor.
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  436. Or at least over Belgorod, Rostov and Krasnodar: "Соборна Українськая держава — Вільна й міцна, від Сяну по Кавказ!"
    2
  437.  @Liza03V  I'd be very surprised if any significant number of Odesans wanted to rename it back to Khadzhibey (as it was under the Ottomans)!
    2
  438.  @benoithudson7235  And unfortunately that isn't going to happen: in the last Republican primary there MTG utterly wiped the floor with all her rivals.
    2
  439. I suspect the Salisbury chemical attacks are a big reason why UK support for Ukraine is so strong, just as the shootdown of MH17 is for the Netherlands.
    2
  440. If Ukrainians ever did carry the war into Russian territory, wouldn't it make more sense to head via Rostov and Krasnodar (which the Ukrainians might rename to Kozakodar) and on towards the Georgian border? As their army anthem (a rehash of the 1929 March of Ukrainian Nationalists) now goes, "A united Ukrainian state, one forever from the San to the Caucasus!"
    2
  441.  @exlibrisas  It was more that Putin decided to make Belarus into a massively subsidized propaganda showpiece, much like communist Cuba (or even West Berlin) during the Cold War. Russia sold vast quantities of oil and gas at a nominal price to Lukashenko's regime, most of which carried on thru the pipelines to the EU where the regime could sell it for its full market value. The huge profits that Russia thus allowed Lukashenko's regime to "earn" was then used to fund a generous welfare state that would keep the people of Belarus largely quiescent.
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  442. ICBMs?
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  443. And Germany wasn't allowed to keep all its 1937 territory either: it lost everything east of the Oder and Neisse rivers along with Stettin (now Polish Szczecin).
    2
  444.  @FINNSTIGAT0R  By 1945 it would have taken a whole new war to liberate Poland from the Soviets, and after four years of pro-Soviet propaganda it would have been almost impossible to get Western Allied soldiers to fight such a war unless the Soviets attacked them first.
    2
  445. The difference is that Putin is a 21st century Tsar, while Zelenskyy is a 21st century Cossack hetman.
    2
  446.  @playa08fly  The Ukrainian city of Kherson was named after the Greek Chersonesos, but (IIRC) Chersonesos is actually close to modern Sevastopol.
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  447.  @tcl78  At least not while there's an expansionist government in the Kremlin.
    1
  448.  @skaut_games7644  Yes, the one positive achievement of Putin's regime was to fix Russian agriculture, which means that Russia can't be starved out like Imperial Germany in 1918 (or more indirectly the Soviet Union in the 1980s).
    1
  449.  @skaut_games7644  Indeed, Germany's shortage of arable land was a reason why they tried to grab Ukraine in both world wars.
    1
  450. Now he just needs to learn how to pronounce the Russian city of Vorónezh (it's not "Vorénz"!)
    1
  451.  @runrau9275  Are you Canadian? I couldn't imagine the Conservative party here in the UK inviting speakers like that, irrespective of the fact that they're expected to lose by a landslide later this week anyway.
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  452.  @happyfelix1440  I'm (pleasantly) surprised there isn't a stronger pro-Russian faction in Poland, given where the whole "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!" slogan came from.
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  453. Although it's ironic given that the aircraft manufacturer Antonov is Ukrainian.
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  454. 22:16 -- I'm guessing that the Soviets named the city "Dzierzhinsk" after Feliks Dzierzhinsky, chairman of the Cheka (predecessor to the KGB).
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  455. In other words 1917 all over again? (Only hopefully this time the Russian Humpty Dumpty doesn't get put back together again...)
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  456. "Just as fire transforms iron into steel, struggle transforms a people into a nation" -- Yevhen Konovalets, OUN leader
    1
  457.  @richardbayer5702  And Pavel Sudoplatov (the NKVD hitman who killed Konovalets) would a couple of years later mastermind the hit on Leon Trotsky.
    1
  458. More than Putin?
    1
  459. Why do the CCP hate Tesla cars? (Other than the fact that they're not built by a Chinese company of course...)
    1
  460. Perhaps the fact that Russia is the only country other than the USA to possess thousands of nuclear weapons has something to do with it?
    1
  461. I'd prefer to quote the March of Ukrainian Nationalists: "Солодше нам у бою умирати, як жити в путах, мов німі раби." ("It is sweeter for us to die in battle, than to live in chains like dumb slaves.")
    1
  462.  @JakeBroe  Taking Taiwan though would allow the Chinese Navy to break through the "first island chain", while taking the Russian Far East wouldn't. I'm sure that the US would greenlight Japan to retake Sakhalin oblast (or Karafuto and Chishima as the Japanese call it) before the Chinese could take it.
    1
  463. The Sudetenland was actually majority-German at the time, so its 2014 analog would be Crimea rather than Donbas.
    1
  464.  @ukie5130  AIUI Crimea's demographics just before Putin annexed it were roughly 60% Russian, 20% Ukrainian, 15% Crimean Tatar and 5% others.
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  465.  @MayaLaya-c2u  I think Biden was playing by the old Cold War playbook which said that direct combat between nuclear powers must be avoided at all costs, because it will inevitable escalate until it becomes a nuclear war.
    1
  466. Or the Big House.
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  467. With the people of Gaza (over 40% of which are children under 15) being an extreme example.
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  468. You're forgetting the power of propaganda: one reason why Latino voters in particular swung heavily towards Trump in November was because MAGA supporters took over Univision in 2022 and basically turned it into Fox News en español.
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  469. @Michael-qc2ck  Or (in some cases) had no idea what was going to happen because their media of choice was spewing lies on Trump's behalf.
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  470. I'd call them the "Treason Caucus" now.
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  471.  @markbrisec3972  Presumably (given the YouTube video he's responding to here) the event would be the Russian invasion of Ukraine? While I don't like Trump, I don't think he deserves to be blamed for America's Covid death toll: the only countries that did much better were islands that banned incoming travel (like Taiwan, Australia or New Zealand) or a totalitarian regime where almost everyone lives in a walled compound that is easy to seal off (China).
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  472.  @davidpeterson8228  I often wonder if the MAGA types want Europe (and Asia, once China makes its move on Taiwan) ruined by war, so they can again be virtual captive markets for American industrial products just like in the 1950s glory days.
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  473.  @neilmantle4662  The "rapist" is likely key, given that most of Russia's male fifth columnists in the West were likely ensnared by KGB or FSB honeytrap operations.
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  474. It would only be of use against two-bit countries that don't have the ability to build tanks.
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  475. Obama was a boomer too, but one of the younger ones.
    1
  476. Does Konfederacja appeal to Poles who see post-Maidan Ukraine essentially as a successor to OUN and UPA?
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  477. 24:12 -- is it reasonable to view Elon Musk as not merely a bigot, but an out-and-out Nazi who views the world through a prism of life-and-death racial struggle?
    1
  478.  @jonlee2217  If GLSDB didn't work because its guidance system was too easily jammed, why wouldn't the original JDAM have the same problem?
    1
  479. ​ @Paul-jb6rk  More (Americans) oppose aid to Israel than support it, but it's only the youngest generations that actually lean towards the Palestinians in their sympathies.
    1
  480. I think it's more pertinent that in 1938 he assassinated Yevhen Konovalets (leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) who was blown to bits on the streets of Rotterdam. Wasn't it the OUN who first popularized the "Слава Україні! Героям Слава! " call-and-response that we're so familiar with now?
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  481. The Serbs didn't have nuclear ICBMs.
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  482. Why do you think the Ukrainian language bounced back strongly after the fall of the USSR (and especially after the Revolution of Dignity), while Ireland has been independent for a century and is still an overwhelmingly English-speaking country?
    1
  483. The UK is an island and thus doesn't really need powerful ground forces very much, so it focuses its military spending more on its navy and air force.
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  484.  @AkaSora96  I guess it would depend on whether the West is mad enough by the time this war is over to countenance expelling Russian populations, much as Germans were expelled from much of eastern Europe after WWII. Although Kuban was originally colonized by Ukrainian cossacks, and thus could conceivably re-Ukrainianized: would it be that much more difficult than de-Russifying Crimea?
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  485.  @AkaSora96  Hence my caveat on "whether the West is mad enough": bad as Putin's atrocities are, they still aren't in anything like the same league as Hitler's (27 million Soviet and 6 million Polish citizens killed, along with more than a million Jews murdered from elsewhere in Europe).
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  486. Surely density isn't the reason for using depleted uranium rather than tungsten, given that tungsten is actually slightly denser than uranium (19.25 g/m³ versus 19.1 g/cm³)?
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  487. I don't see how it would given that Snyder never mentioned the nuclear elephant in the room.
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  488. Russia is one of the world's greatest petrostates: do you think Russia-symps on the US right see Putin in part as a champion of the fossil-fuelled way of life (eg big cars, abundant foreign holidays) against the environmentalists who aim to destroy it?
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  489. I wonder if WWII-style propeller fighters would be more economical than modern jets as anti-Shahed weapons?
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  490.  @tkc1129  I was thinking WWII style (in the sense of prop-driven with guns as the main armament), not necessarily refurbishing actual WWII fighters. But then there may possibly a reason why even a straight-wing, strictly subsonic combat aircraft would be better off jet-powered (the A-10 being one famous example of such a low-speed jet).
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  491. Plus the Western nations had lots of troops in Afghanistan then, depending on a logistics chain that Russia could easily sever.
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  492.  @Joshwaheazo  Housing in the UK is so expensive mainly because of massive NIMBYism enabled by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which requires local government to approve every development on a case-by-case basis. In addition local governments have only minimal tax-raising powers, meaning that it's not in their interest for local population to increase.
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  493.  @w.reidripley1968  I thought it was the 2000 election when the colors were standardized?
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  494. ​ @fdm2155 Now over $1m!
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  495.  @JakeBroe  I suspect the US anti-environmentalist Right (ie the kind of people who might be into "rolling coal") see Russia as an ally because it is a country that will oppose climate action for two reasons (because its economy depends on fossil fuel exports, and because it is the coldest of the world's major powers).
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  496.  @irenes.2807 There are millions of pro-Russian MAGA supporters in America: almost none of whom will have been personally bribed by Russia.
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  497. Could he tell Trump some non-critical secrets that (if leaked to Putin) he could use to prove Trump's treachery?
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  498. Cuba also did that with the doctors they deployed abroad as part of their "medical diplomacy".
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  499.  @andycockrum1212  Probably because Crimea is the only part of Ukraine that was actually majority ethnic-Russian (as opposed to majority Russian-speaking).
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  500. Are you saying that Western allies of Ukraine need to threaten to carpet-nuke Iran?
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  501.  @questionmaker5666  And my point is that the West's hesitance about supporting Ukraine is primarily due to Russian nuclear blackmail, so it isn't reasonable to describe Iran as "braver" given that it isn't being threatened with nuclear annihilation in the same way.
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  502.  @CountScarlioni  US support for Israel isn't as bipartisan as it used to be: Republicans and old Democrats like Biden are still strongly pro-Israel, but younger Democrats are not.
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  503. The US sensibly took only the part of Mexico that had hardly any people in it.
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  504. Although didn't Carlson let slip during the Dominion Voter Systems lawsuit that he actually hated Trump with a passion?
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  505. I feel like that when I hear Zoryana's rendition of "March of Ukrainian Nationalists": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R7MTG-rGCo
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  506. The USSR was ruled by the Communist Party, while the KGB (renamed to FSB) basically took over Russia after the USSR's fall.
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  507. These days we have crypto fever instead of gold fever!
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  508.  @grantadamson3478  If Putin is losing the war badly enough that he thinks he's a dead man regardless then it doesn't matter whether he values his own life or not. I suspect the actual erroneous belief that restrains the West is the belief that Putin could launch a nuclear strike all by himself to "take the bastards with me".
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  509. Trump doesn't seem to be a territorial expansionist though, just a hater of non-white immigrants. I wonder if MAGA supporters are an example of James Kunstler's 2005 quip when he said that "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlements to a McHouse and a McCar".
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  510.  @sab3295  Didn't California basically flip from a red state to a blue state circa 1990, when its house prices rocketed as it ran out of virgin land to build sprawl on?
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  511.  @sab3295  Of course not: where did you get that idea? My point is that generally red states have cheap housing and blue states have expensive housing.
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  512. And Chávez and Maduro weren't just authoritarian socialists, they were hilariously inept authoritarian socialists. They used the national oil company as a cash cow to fund their social programmes, overlooking that Venezuelan oil is very heavy and sour and thus requires far more capital investment to usefully exploit than (for example) Saudi oil.
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  513.  ScottHendrix-yz3du  The problem was that South Vietnam never enjoyed popular legitimacy, because it didn't have any indigenous capitalist class that wasn't hopelessly compromised by collaboration with the French colonialists.
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  514.  @graeme9114  I think @jaybee9269 was thinking of the fact that even the pre-2014 Crimean population was majority ethnic Russian. Incidentally, given that Crimea and what the Russians call "Novorossiya" were all conquered by imperial Russia from the Tatars at about the same time: how did different places there end up with such different demographics? Kherson is overwhelmingly ethnic Ukrainian, Donbas is majority ethnic Ukrainian but with a large ethnic Russian minority, and Crimea is majority ethnic Russian.
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  515.  @graeme9114  Surely the real issue is self determination, but a lot of people just assume that ethnic Russians would want to be part of Russia.
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  516. I think a lot of them are the type that would sell their own mothers for cheap gasoline.
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  517.  @iris1224wwad  I suspect he only won last November because of the massive Hamas attack on Israel. (And isn't it kinda suspicious that October 7 is Putin's birthday?)
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  518. Same is true of George Galloway's Workers Party GB.
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  519.  @dontsupportrats4089  I'd advise any American who lives in a district that is "safe" for one party to register as a member of that party (even if they don't support it) because the only election that actually matters in such a district is the dominant party's primary election.
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  520.  @JakeBroe  Not money but kompromat.
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  521. ​ @h8GW Indeed, and I believe some MAGA types want Putin to get away with genocide in Ukraine because they dream of gunning down the refugees currently streaming across the Mexican border.
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  522.  @petersinclair3997  Is CCC a reference to a (junk) credit rating?
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  523. ​ @kleinweichkleinweich  Because Nazi Germany didn't have nuclear ICBMs, which is very fortunate given that Hitler would almost certainly actually used them: even the threat of MAD likely wouldn't have constrained him given his extreme Social Darwinism.
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  524.  @peagames2002  My point was that if Russia conquered Ukraine, the resulting millions of Ukraine refugees would change the politics of western Europe in a strongly anti-Russia direction. Sort of like the Miami Cubans but on a far larger scale.
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  525.  @antoniograncino3506  Not steppe (that's eastern Ukraine, southern Russia and Kazakhstan) but taiga forest.
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  526. Nigel Farage is likely a kompromized traitor much like Trump, so we need to start doing what's necessary to stop Reform winning elections here!
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  527.  @madyogi6164  Reagan switched to the Republicans precisely because he saw the Democrats as soft on communism.
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  528. Wouldn't the USSR (and even the Western world) have still been using mostly vacuum-tube electronics when Tsar Bomba was detonated?
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  529.  @rogermorris8737  No, the main reasons why America is doing better than Europe economically are: 1. Less dependent (thanks to fracking) on imported fossil fuels: traitors like Gerhard Schröder didn't help either! 2. Big Tech is almost entirely American: Europeans can't compete because the European market is too diverse, the individual national markets are too small, and tech is a very winner-takes-all industry.
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  530. Anyone else here thinking that Russia's unhealthy vodka-sodden lifestyle actually gives them an advantage, as they don't have millions of alzies that need looking after (because they didn't live long enough to get Alzheimer's in the first place)?
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  531.  @debrainwasher  I don't think it was a Chinese conspiracy like you describe: it's just that during the noughties when the first China Shock happened so many people outside China were profiting from "Made in China": multinational corporations, manufacturers of the high-value components used by Chinese industry (eg US computer chips, German machine tools, or South Korean screens), retailers such as Wal-Mart, and consumers themselves. The only losers were Western factory workers, and they weren't seen as politically relevant until 2016. The coming second China Shock (where China is now doubling-down on exports after its real estate collapse) will meet far more resistance because Trump rehabilitated protectionism in the US, because China is now promoting its own brands instead of producing for Western brands, and because China is now trying to onshore every step of the production process leaving far fewer opportunities for Western corporations to profit.
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  532. And even autumn may become a problem, as the same mud that did for Russia's offensive against Kyiv and Kharkiv in the spring will play havoc with any attempt by Ukraine to retake its lost territories.
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  533.  @thepunish3r735  Jake likely believes that Trump's "plan" for Ukraine is a pack of lies anyway.
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  534. Ukrainian air defenses are pretty effective against conventional Russian ballistic missiles, so would thus be similarly effective against nuclear missiles with similar flight profiles. The real danger is that Russia would lash out directly at NATO, as that would involve ICBMs which we still don't have the ability to intercept (because they're several times faster than short-range ballistic missiles).
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  535. 20:43 - I think the word Jake was looking for was "mercantilism".
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  536. It was the 6th Army not the 9th. And isn't the fact that Russia has obsessed over taking a minor town like Bakhmut just another indicator of their incompetence? At least Stalingrad was really important strategically, given its position on the Volga river, which was a crucial logistical artery bringing Lend-Lease supplies sent into the Russian heartland via the Middle East?
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  537. Just as Trump and other pro-Russian US politicians would be irrelevant if they didn't have millions of supporters.
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  538. Didn't much of the old Ukrainian navy defect to Russia in 2014?
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  539. Although Churchill was also wrong on Hitler: while he knew Hitler couldn't be appeased he believed he could be deterred instead. That wasn't the case, as Hitler was already hell-bent on another world war as soon as he got into power.
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  540. Perhaps because the US isn't officially at war with Russia?
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  541. One thought is whether this war will cause future western historians to view the OUN and UPA more sympathetically than before.
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  542. 8:08 - "It doesn't matter where they go: as long as they don't have their own state, the majority (wherever they go) always seems to want to purge and kill them." So I guess we can fairly describe Jake Broe as a Zionist then?
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  543. Joe Biden was born during WWII (1942) which means he's actually too old to be a Baby Boomer: he was actually the first -- and will almost certainly be the only -- Silent Generation President of the United States. All Presidents up to and including George HW Bush were Greatest Generation or older, while Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump were Boomers.
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  544.  @Simonsvids  Surely the American Civil War shows that "history is written by the victors" isn't always the case?
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  545. As a British newsreel said in 1941 of German soldiers outside Moscow: "these miserable creatures deserve no sympathy: they were sent to stamp out life! Now, life is stamping out them! "
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  546. Isn't Ukraine reluctant to invade recognized Russian territory for the same reason that NATO is unwilling to deploy its own forces in Ukraine: fear that it would provoke the Russians to escalate to nuclear war?
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  547. Russia is only good for Putin and his inner circle, and Vance knows he'll never be able to get into it. Instead he hopes to be in the inner circle of a Putinesque regime in the US.
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  548. Branko Milanovic strongly disagreed with this "Ukraine is a dangerous example to Russians" hypothesis, pointing out that Russia is a richer country than Ukraine, and that before the war more Ukrainians migrated to Russia than vice versa: https://glineq.blogspot.com/2022/12/four-historico-ideological-theories.html
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  549.  @blueeyeswhitedragon9839  No: 1. No Olympic games were held during WWII of course, 2. I think @stevemcgowen was referring to the Winter Olympics in China that came immediately before Russia invaded Ukraine.
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  550. Given how Russia is struggling in Ukraine it's clear that they'd stand zero chance of winning a war with NATO. And since Russia hasn't nuked us already (which they would have done if they truly believed that "we don't care if Russia dies as long as the West dies too") then why are they being so provocative towards the west? Perhaps what is motivating Russia's rulers is a belief that while Russia (as a political concept) could survive defeat at the hands of NATO (a force seen as equal or stronger to Russia itself) it couldn't survive defeat at the hands of their supposed "inferiors" in Ukraine? It reminds me of how European colonialism in East Asia rested on a belief in European superiority, that was held not just by the Europeans themselves but also by their colonial subjects. Even when European colonial powers (such as France in Indochina or the Netherlands in Indonesia) were defeated by another European power (Nazi Germany) it had little effect on the colonial system, but when they were defeated by an Asian power (Imperial Japan) the aura of European superiority was shattered, and (even though Japan was itself defeated just a few years later) decolonization was just a matter of time.
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  551. Перемога Україні!
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  552. When I heard about stuff like Hamas beheading babies, I thought "maybe Israel (or more realistically, the USAF) needs to carpet-bomb the Gaza Strip until there's nothing left more than 6 inches across?". I'm appalled that I had a thought like that, especially when 9/11 never inspired similar genocidal thinking on my part: then I wondered if an enraged US might launch nuclear ICBMs at Afghanistan, but I certainly never thought it would actually be justified, let alone hoped that it would happen!
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  553. Would the latter scenario be like how Piedmont in the 19th century gave up Savoy and Nice to France in exchange for military assistance against Austria (which they'd use to set in motion the ultimate unification of Italy)?
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  554. So why does Britain have such a serious problem with illegal immigrants crossing the Channel in makeshift boats?
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  555.  @planmet  So you're saying that Jake's proposal to combat US illegal immigration wouldn't work, because it would just mean the immigrants would become even cheaper labour to be exploited by criminal organizations?
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  556.  @planmet Presumably the scheme to deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda will have a similar problem, in that it will also fail as a deterrent due to ignorance on the part of the would-be illegal immigrants.
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  557. And a lot of global South countries, which likely support Russia in a spirit of (bastardizing Karl Marx) "natural resource exporters of the world, unite!"
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  558.  @barrybrodin7085  I suspect it's not just money, and that Putin has pictures of Trump (probably originally from Epstein's island) that if released would send him to jail for life.
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  559.  @gregmonks  Those kids of course ended up doing nothing for the Nazi cause (because the Nazi regime only lasted 12 years) but they did fuel West Germany's postwar Wirtschaftswunder when they came of age. An economy flourishes when it has lots of hardworking young adults but few child or elderly dependents: China benefited similarly towards the end of the 20th century from the sudden switch from Maoist pro-natalism to the one child policy.
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  560. The failures of European countries was mostly years before this invasion started, when they closed down their ammunition factories to save money.
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  561. Yup, FDR's war on the robber barons in the 1930s left the US in far better shape when it had to fight the Nazis and the Japs!
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  562.  @Whatshisname346  War is always a negative-sum game, but you're talking about a war where even the "winner" ends up worse off than they were before.
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  563. Isn't the big fear that Russia (if defeated too badly) will adopt a "take the bastards with us" mentality?
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  564. I thought the Ukrainian "r" was an Italian-style trilled R rather than a French-style uvular R?
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  565. They do, which is why Russian propaganda claims the Ukrainians are the real Nazis. The fact that post-Maidan Ukraine has adopted some symbolism from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists -- such as their army anthem, or even the "Слава Україні! Героям слава!" call-and-response (which Jake often repeats in English at the end of his videos here: "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!") -- may have helped Russian propagandists in this respect.
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  566. So like the Chinese warlord era 100 years ago then?
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  567. What really drives the asymmetry (in my opinion) is that Russia has a tradition of killing leaders who lose foreign wars. The fear is that a defeated Putin may decide that death by nuclear holocaust is preferable to death by lynching, and the main defense against this possibility is that Putin almost certainly can't personally launch nuclear missiles.
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  568. I'm partial to Phillip Hallam-Baker's hypothesis that the Kremlin hacked Fox News back in 2014 and used it to engineer a sex scandal that removed Ailes and O'Reilly, and replaced them with Russian stooges Hannity and Carlson.
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  569.  @m4rsianer  What about the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s? (Or in this century, the Armenia-Azerbaijan War?)
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  570.  @johnsnow674  Indeed: aren't the skies over Ukraine pretty much ruled by missiles and drones?
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  571.  @WinVisten  I wouldn't get your hopes up there: while apparently the Russian mob have tried at least 3 times to kill Putin (because of how his war destroyed their business) he may have the same luck as Hitler himself, who of course only eventually killed himself as the Red Army was overrunning Berlin.
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  572. Why would a single-use jet-powered weapon ever be described as a "drone" rather than as a cruise missile?
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  573. The Zionists wanted Palestine because it was the ancient homeland of the Jews, and rejected attempts by the British to offer them alternative locations (one of which was Uganda).
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  574. Do MAGA types support Russia because a lot of them lead very fossil-fuel intensive lifestyles (suburban McMansions, monster SUVs etc) and believe the Russian petrostate would defend their lifestyles against the environmentalists?
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  575.  @rustyshackleford2719  Соборна Українськая держава: Вільна й міцна, від Сяну по Кавказ!
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  576. Hitler didn't have thousands of nuclear weapons.
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  577.  @-Yurkey  Nukes may not be a war-winning weapon, but they're still an excellent "take the bastards with me" vengeance weapon. After all, today's nuclear ICBMs are basically the more developed successors of Hitler's V-2 rockets, which were literally labelled as a "vengeance weapon".
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  578. I don't think that coffin photo is too hard to believe: my understanding is that the bomb was planted under her seat, so that while her upper body (as you see in the photo) was reasonably intact (at least enough that a mortician could make it presentable) everything from the waist down was pretty much turned to hamburger.
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  579.  @Azuria969  Have you seen any anti-Ukraine Republicans in the flesh though, or only online?
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  580.  @Azuria969  Remember that if they're not people you know from elsewhere then perhaps they're Russian trolls/bots.
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  581. I'd advise anyone who lives in a Congressional district where the Democrats have no chance of winning to register as a Republican, because the only election that actually matters in such districts is the Republican primary election.
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  582. Iraq and the Taliban didn't have nuclear ICBMs.
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  583. I wonder if some of the particular Polish farmers involved hate Ukraine because they had family members killed in the Volhynia massacres during World War II? Especially when post-Maidan Ukraine looked somewhat to the OUN and UPA in building its national identity (for example the whole "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!" thing).
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  584. Russia uses Stepan Bandera's OUN as a justification for destroying the Ukrainian nation, but Bandera was no more of a Nazi collaborator than Stalin was, and Stalin arguably had less of an excuse (given that he led a powerful continental state as opposed to a relatively powerless national liberation movement). Hitler double-crossed Bandera within two weeks of double-crossing Stalin.
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  585.  @jimb9063  In most of Europe antisemitism was driven by the status of the Jews as a market-dominant minority (the same was true of anti-Armenian sentiment in the Ottoman Empire, or anti-Chinese sentiment in southeast Asia). In Germany that wasn't the case as Jews in Germany didn't have anything like as much economic dominance, as well as being more assimilated to the majority culture. Nazi antisemitism wasn't much like traditional antisemitism: it was rooted in extreme Social Darwinist ideology (which ultimately gave rise to the infamous Nero Order in 1945) and was global and exterminationist in its character. More Jews were massacred in just three days by the Nazis at Babyn Yar than died in all the Tsarist pogroms combined.
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  586. AIUI the Russian ideology now is pretty much "the entire world owes us bigtime, because we saved them from Hitler in World War II". Plus of course they portray Ukraine in its post-Maidan form as an intrinsically Nazi nation, taking advantage of its adoption of OUN and UPA symbolism (like the "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!" that our host ends his shows with here).
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  587. 🎉
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  588. IIRC when coal mining was first established in the Donbas during the late 19th century, the Ukrainians mostly weren't willing to become miners so the mine owners recruited miners from central Russia instead.
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  589. I wonder if he thought "there's a reason why we Americans only have solid-fuel ICBMs now"?
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  590. Except they'll only send men who have families whom the Kim regime can hold hostage to their good behaviour.
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  591.  @ghyslainabel  While both coal and nuclear power plants are essentially steam engines, natural gas power plants are more like jet engines: they can change their power output much more quickly, which makes them ideal for backing up unreliable wind and solar power. This synergy between natural gas and renewables is the main reason why many countries have become so dependent on natural gas for electricity generation, which is of course one of the reasons why the Russians (as one of the world's biggest natural gas producers) thought they could get away with this war: they put their faith in "King Gas" just as the Confederacy did in "King Cotton".
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  592. I think another possible factor is that many African countries like Russia are exporters of natural resources, and have a common interest in increasing the price of those resources.
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  593. I have two hypotheses: 1. They're the kind of people who are so wedded to car culture (think the Gilets-Jaunes in France) that they'd sell their own mothers for cheaper oil, or 2. In the case of American Trump supporters, perhaps they actually WANT a bigger European (and East Asian) war because they want to bring back the 1950s when the US had almost no foreign competition. Effectively they hope Xi and Putin will be to the 21st century what Hitler and Tojo were to the 20th.
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  594.  @martf3129  It's a lot harder for a democratically elected government to convincingly threaten to blow up the world if they don't get their own way, than a dictator who'd probably lose his own life anyway if he loses power.
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  595.  @Brian-om2hh  Elections in modern Russia (unlike the USSR or Nazi Germany) don't literally only have one candidate: rather they have a few "controlled opposition" parties that just passively go along with the Kremlin's wishes.
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  596. I think the "one third to one quarter" is referring to population rather than land area.
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  597.  @normandubowitz1965  Been listening to "Hotel Chornobaïvka" lately? 😉
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  598.  @wokeaf1337  I thought the 1947 famine was caused by a combination of bad weather and the death of so many young men in the war.
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  599.  @andreverwoerd1378  "The devil (Putin) looks after his own."
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  600. Money is just an accounting mechanism: what actually matters is physical resources. German industry was constantly switching priorities between (for example) ammo, then U-boats, then aircraft, then back to ammo, because it was constrained by its raw material supplies. Jake mentioned that Germany looked to France to improve its food supply situation, but the occupation seriously damaged the French economy by cutting it off from resources outside the European continent. Lots of milk went to waste because there was no gasoline to haul it to dairies, while French industry was of little use to the Germans because pre-war it had been powered by British coal, and the Germans didn't have enough coal to run French industry as well as their own. And a big proximate motivation was the Holocaust was to conserve food supplies: the Poles was lucky to avoid outright starvation during WW2, being saved by the extermination of the Polish Jews in 1942, a bumper crop in 1943, and the collapse of the Eastern Front in 1944.
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  601. Especially when the current Israel cabinet includes Kahanist ministers who are arguably the ideological mirror image of Hamas.
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  602. I thought the more westerly land you referred to (roughly modern Ukraine + Belarus) was then usually called "Ruthenia"?
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  603.  @ThomasJohansson-mo5gf  Surely the real blackmailer would be Putin with his threats of nuclear war?
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  604.  @unknown14191  An interesting hypothesis! More thoroughly worked out than my own: that the Trumpists want Europe (and Asia, once China makes its move on Taiwan) to be devastated by war, thus re-creating the 1950s glory days when the world was a virtual captive market for American industrial products. Doesn't seem to tally though with the strongly anti-immigration (and to some degree anti-intellectual) bent of Trump supporters.
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  605. Surely the limiting factor is how long it would take to train 1000 Ukrainian Abrams crews?
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  606. I wonder how many people now take the position of the Anti-imperial Block of Nations (formerly Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations) that Russia needs to be broken up, because it will be incorrigibly imperialist (regardless of regime type) in anything like its present borders?
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  607.  @AstroGremlinAmerican  AFAIK the cost of fossil fuels (used both as fuel and as chemical feedstock) is a far bigger issue for the chemical industry than the cost of labor, especially as I don't think it offers many of the kind of jobs that could be done by illegals (whose skills tend to be in agricultural or construction labor).
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  608.  @Jakob_DK  I was thinking of the jobs that illegals in the US do routinely: anyway my original point is that employing illegals in Germany (or any other action to reduce labor costs there) wouldn't be enough to compensate for the much higher gas prices.
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  609. Perhaps it stands for Китай (China), as in suggesting that China will annex the Russian Far East? I hope that if this does happen that Japan at least secures its backdoor by reclaiming Chishima and Karafuto (aka Sakhalin Oblast): of course Sakhalin on that cake is too skinny to be able to see if it's marked with a Я (for Японія)...
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  610.  @JakeBroe  What's your take on why so many MAGA types became anti-vaxxers, even though Trump himself was not?
    1
  611. Because a lot of them don't actually "love Russia", rather they propagandize for Russia because if they don't then Putin will release the photos of them raping a 13-year-old.
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  612. Isn't Moldova basically a fake country carved out of Romania by the Russians?
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  613. It IS Germany's fault that they made themselves dependent on Russian gas, by shutting down their nuclear power plants and failing to build LNG terminals to import gas from alternative sources.
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  614.  @monabear7287  Didn't the Mafia help the US take Sicily from the fascists in 1943?
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  615. My thought was "videos from Jeffrey Epstein's island of Trump raping kids", but I'm not even sure that would be enough to coerce Trump sufficiently.
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  616. And to think that back in 2018 when the Ukrainian military adopted the "Slava Ukraini! Heroyam Slava!" call-and-response, it was highly controversial even in Ukraine itself due to its origins with the OUN.
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  617.  @sofiajohansson8537  Maybe that's one reason why Norway is enthusiastic about traditional national dress in a way that few Western European countries are today?
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  618. Ukraine never reached the Volga, although the post-WWI Ukrainian People's Republic did claim some territories that are now part of Russia, such as the cities of Belgorod (Bilhorod in Ukrainian), Rostov-on-Don, plus the Kuban region -- this last claim is why the March of Ukrainian Nationalists describes Ukraine as extending "from the San to the Caucasus".
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  619. People can never win against the army, at least as long as the army remains an army.
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  620. Chamberlain appeased Hitler to buy time to rearm (after Hitler got the jump on the Western democracies using massive deficit spending, much of it concealed from the outside world via the Mefo bills strategem). I don't think that's why Trump wants to appease Putin...
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  621. I think a lot of Trump supporters believe he'd bring gas (petrol) prices down.
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  622.  @mettejakobsen7017  Would it be a good idea for the West to attack the Wagnerites in Africa?
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  623.  @mettejakobsen7017  Why: do you think it could provoke a nuclear response?
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  624.  @crabluva  What, you mean that the Kadyrovites were recalled to Chechnya?
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  625. You do realize that the Russian regime is selling this war to their people by equating the Ukrainians to the Nazis who (I presume) were responsible for that quote?
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  626.  @360Nomad  The Nazis wanted to REcolonize Eastern Europe (with German settlers) while Ukrainian nationalists (and before them Polish Prometheists) wanted to DEcolonize it.
    1
  627. No beaches in Zimbabwe though: it's landlocked!
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  628. The Ukrainian military's anthem is also pretty inspiring: I now know how to sing it even though I'd never studied any Slavic language before! https://youtu.be/Mnh8ePLfgRE
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  629. You mean like how Britain stripped "ISIS bride" Shamima Begum of her citizenship? (And unlike Shamima, Tucker Carlson wasn't even an impressionable child when he joined the bad guys...)
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  630. ​ @EenYouTubeGebruiker Thanks for using the decolonized spelling "Qazaqstan"!
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  631.  @tanyaroberson9629 I'm not suggesting that Russia could actually win a nuclear war, so much that the West is afraid to resist Russia too aggressively for fear that Putin (believing his own personal death is imminent anyway) will use his nuclear arsenal to play Samson in the temple.
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  632. Capitalism, socialism and democracy: a country worth living in needs to have all three of them.
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  633. Another Marshall Plan for Ukraine and another Morgenthau Plan for Russia?
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  634.  @Edward-lo4hb  How much do you think support for Russia in Africa (and other third-world regions) is a case of solidarity between countries that export natural resources?
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  635. I suspect that if the Muscovites were using the two-headed eagle on their 14th-century coins, they were far more likely to have adopted it from the Byzantines (who also used such a symbol) than from the Golden Horde. Especially when the Horde adopted the Islamic faith which of course frowns upon any kind of figurative art! The same could be of the Muscovite tradition of absolute autocracy: while we don't have much evidence of how the Golden Horde actually functioned (because most of their cities were obliterated by Timur), the khans of its Crimean successor state apparently had rather limited powers, more like the rulers of Kyiv or Novgorod rather than Muscovy.
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  636. The main point of this Hamas atrocity was to provoke bloodthirsty Israeli revenge against Gaza that derail the negotiations between Israel and Saudi Arabia that seeks to isolate Iran and its terrorist allies (Hezbollah, the Houthis, the Iraqi Shia militias and now Hamas).
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  637. I wonder if the logic of some Trump supporters is something like "America was great in the 1950s when we had almost no foreign competition (because WWII had destroyed it all) so we need another world war to devastate Europe and Asia and turn them into our captive markets again." ?
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  638. Do you think the Quran-burnings in Sweden are being arranged by Russian agents to sabotage Sweden's NATO membership bid?
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  639. I suspect some conservatives are still deluded enough to think they can ally with Russia against China (even though that ceased to be a realistic possibility after roughly 2008) while others perhaps hope for another world war that will leave Europe and Asia in ruins (and thus a virtual captive market for American goods, just like in the glory days of the 1950s).
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  640.  @phild3936  Very much so: it's been dubbed "победобесие" ("victory frenzy"). As a Brit I'd argue we have a milder version of the same disease here, and it was one of the factors behind Brexit. And given the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact the Russian certainly have a nerve to accuse Ukraine of being an inherently Nazi nation, especially when Hitler double-crossed Bandera just a couple of weeks after double-crossing Stalin!
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  641. I think a lot of them think that NATO countries (and even non-NATO Ukraine) are as much US puppets as the Warsaw Pact states were Soviet puppets.
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  642.  @MiddleAgedGeek  You do realize that Chamberlain only appeased Hitler for as long as Hitler was only claiming lands full of Germans (like the Sudetenland: the equivalent to that in this war would be Crimea). Once Hitler took over the rest of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain realized that Britain would have to fight.
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  643.  @petersinclair3997  Modern China's borders aren't so much shaped by the Ming dynasty though as by their successors the Qing.
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  644.  @BKYoutube-zq3yv  A country can't join NATO while it's at war.
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  645.  @TorianTammas  So you think Russia (in a war with NATO) would lose St. Petersburg before it would lose Kaliningrad Königsberg?
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  646. Unfortunately the russians still have their nukes.
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  647.  @Alphasig336  I thought the weapons that the Taliban used to win in 2021 came more from China than from Russia?
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  648. It was originally the song of the Sich Riflemen, who were a Ukrainian contingent in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I.
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  649. Carlson threw away a $20m/year gig at Fox News so he could spew the Kremlin line on Ukraine: why would he do that unless Putin had kompromat on him?
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  650. ​ @carolwilliams8511  Why would Hamas (which claims to represent the overwhelmingly non-Shi'a Palestinians: the minority who aren't Sunni are mostly Christians) have allowed itself to become dependent on the overwhelmingly Shi'a Iran? And for that matter, what does Iran get out of its enmity to Israel? Shi'a Iran can't realistically claim to be the leader of the (overwhelmingly Sunni) wider Muslim world, and it can hardly take Israeli territory when there's hundreds of miles of Arab land in the way! There's no obvious commonality of interests, unlike Iranian support for Shi'a terrorist groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis...
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  651. Our equivalent of "Trump" was Brexit.
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  652. How would people here rate the probabilities of the following war outcomes? * Decisive Russian victory: Russia annexes the whole of Ukraine * Major Russian victory: Russia annexes the entire Black Sea coast + all territory east of the Dnipro * Minor Russian victory: Russia annexes the entire Black Sea coast * Pyrrhic Russian victory: Russia annexes the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts + land bridge to Crimea (as existing now) * Stalemate: Russia annexes the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts * Pyrrhic Ukrainian victory: January 2020 status quo restored * Minor Ukrainian victory: All of Donbas reclaimed, but Crimea remains Russian * Major Ukrainian victory: Pre-2014 status quo restored * Decisive Ukrainian victory: «від Сяну по Кавказ!»
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  653. US Foreign Policy Alignments by Political Stance: Tankie Far-Left: 🇵🇸🇷🇺 Progressive Left: 🇵🇸🇺🇦 Broad Centrist (Liberals to RINOs): 🇮🇱🇺🇦 Trumpist Right: 🇮🇱🇷🇺 Neo-Nazi Far-Right: 🇵🇸🇷🇺 Good argument for horseshoe theory!
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  654. Does this mean that WWII battles for Ukrainian cities should likely still be referred to using the Russian names of said cities?
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  655.  @lepidoptera9337  I suppose artillery shell production may be a possibility for reviving the economy of the Donbas, as it wasn't just the region which has suffered the most in this war, but was also a "rust belt" region with a tradition of heavy industry, whose economic grievances arguably helped cause the war by convincing some of its less-educated residents to turn traitor in 2014.
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  656. Does Germany have any significant tendency of people who basically think Ukraine had it coming because of what the OUN and UPA did during World War II? It would be similar to how some Zionists believe Palestine forfeited its right to exist when Haj Amin al-Husseini collaborated with the Nazis, or indeed to how many ANTI-Zionists see the Nakba as an unforgivable atrocity which makes the state of Israel fundamentally illegitimate. That could be pertinent because post-Maidan Ukraine's identity does draw somewhat from the OUN's legacy: for example the call-and-response "Слава Україні! Героям слава!" (which Jake himself of course uses in English translation to conclude his videos here), or the Ukrainian military's adoption of a version of the OUN's anthem "Зродились ми великої години".
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  657. If they're Iranians in the West though then they're probably people who fled the regime (or their descendants). Sort of like the fiercely anti-Communist Miami Cubans.
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  658. Would that increase the risk of Putin using nukes?
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  659. I'm following Jake's videos from England too: sometimes I worry I'm getting a bit too drawn into following this war though! Since about April my musical guilty pleasure has been "March of the New Army" (aka "We were born in a great hour") and I even learned how to sing it myself even though I've never studied any Slavic languages before.
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  660.  @JakeBroe  AIUI the biggest problem with confiscating Russian assets is that there are usually multiple conflicting claims on those assets, so any country that seized the assets may end up having to pay compensation to another country that had made its own claim.
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  661. Isn't the Speaker of the House the nearest thing that the American presidential democracy has to a Prime Minister in the European sense?
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  662. Any thoughts on recent developments in Syria? The rebels have surged and captured Aleppo, now that Russia is no longer in a position to bail out Assad.
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  663.  @CountScarlioni  He also had a show "Comment" on Iran's Press TV.
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  664. One issue is that Putin is NOT a fascist dictator set up to mobilize the masses behind his aims, but rather a wannabe Tsar set up to depoliticize his subjects as much as possible.
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  665.  @peterfireflylund  There were two major differences between Korea and Vietnam that explain the difference in outcomes: 1) South Korea's only border was with the North, while South Vietnam also bordered Laos and Cambodia -- this meant that light enemy forces and their supplies could get into South Vietnam undetected. 2) The US didn't dare invade North Vietnam because they expected that it would bring China directly into the war (just as approaching the Yalu river had during the Korean War). This was seen as an unacceptable risk because by the late 1960s China had nuclear weapons.
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  666.  @dennisbradley5620  Divided government is an issue of US-style presidential democracies (or France-style semi-presidential democracies). It's not an issue in parliamentary democracies where the legislature elects the executive.
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  667.  @JakeBroe  Does this mean that the House Republicans will pass the Ukraine aid bill as soon as it's too late in the year for them to be primaried?
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  668.  @solconcordia4315  In the United States (and most of the rest of the Western world) in 1865 chattel slavery was considered a barbaric anachronism, but white supremacy was considered absolutely normal, so no-one in the North was willing to spend the resources to support a vast army of occupation in the South in order to protect black people.
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  669. "...and the Wolf chewed up the children and spit out their bones...But those were Foreign Children and it didn't really matter."
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  670.  @cgdcgyUC  My first guess would be more "they fear being drafted to fight Russia".
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  671.  @jonybe5854  I wouldn't necessarily liken Russians to Nazis, as Nazism was explicitly an ideology of racial struggle, while the Eurasianist ideology of imperialist Russia (like the Lusotropical ideology of imperialist Portugal) is (rhetorically at least) anti-racist. (On the other hand the Russians -- like the Nazis and unlike the Portuguese fascist regime -- were fighting not just to preserve their empire but to expand it.) Regime change in Lisbon (the Carnation Revolution of 1974) destroyed Portuguese imperialism: how likely is a regime change in Moscow to destroy Russian imperialism?
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  672. 14:40 - "Соборна Українськая держава — вільна й міцна, від Сяну по Кавказ!". ("A united Ukrainian state — free and strong from the San to the Caucasus!") Would serve Russia right for trying to starve the Middle East with a Black Sea grain blockade, much as the Oder-Neisse Line was Germany's punishment for its genocidal atrocities in Poland...
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  673.  @weirdo1060  And Japanese occupation money (aka "banana money") became utterly worthless once Japan surrendered in 1945.
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  674. If China retakes mainland Outer Manchuria, wouldn't that effectively make Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands the northernmost end of the "first island chain" separating China from the open Pacific? Would the West be likely to support Japan making a move on those islands as a counter-move, given that prior to World War II the entire Kuril chain along with the southern half of Sakhalin were Japanese? Another interesting piece of info is that after the Russian Empire conquered Outer Manchuria from the Chinese in the 19th century, many of the settlers who colonized it were in fact Ukrainians: those Ukrainian settlers came to refer to the territory as "Green Ukraine".
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  675. Is Witch speaking in the Russian language at some point there? I'm sure I heard her saying "Героям Слава!" beginning with the Russian G sound rather than the Ukrainian H sound.
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  676.  Fidd88  Much of Western Ukraine including Lviv and Ternopil was ruled by Poland between the wars: the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was founded there as a terrorist organization to try to regain an independent Ukrainian state. They hoped for German help against Ukraine's Soviet and Polish oppressors, and in June 1941 they attempted to declare Ukrainian independence, only to have most of their leadership arrested by the Gestapo: the Germans saw Ukraine not as a worthy ally but simply as fertile farmland ideal for German colonization. Those OUN activists that did get away formed the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) which fought against the Germans, the Poles and the Soviets simultaneously, and which were only finally defeated by the USSR in the 1950s. It is notable that once Ukrainians began again to see Russia as an enemy (following the theft of Crimea and the ongoing war in the Donbas) they embraced a lot of their OUN and UPA heritage, such as the "Slava Ukraini! Heroyam Slava" ("Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!" -- Jake himself uses it to round up his shows!) call-and-response greeting, plus the anthem "Zrodylys' my velykoyi hodyny" ("We were born in a great hour"), a modified version of which is now the anthem of the Ukrainian armed forces.
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  677.  @marieelliott8368  Isn't Farage's Reform on the far right also pro-Russian?
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  678. What kind of sex history does Piers Morgan have: is there anything that would have let the Russians kompromize him?
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  679.  @philipcovell3272  The high spending is largely unavoidable as it's the cost of old people, such as pensions and health care spending.
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  680. Although wouldn't the use of western tanks in Ukraine face a similar issue to that which the Nazis faced with their Tiger tanks: that many of the local bridges wouldn't be able to support their weight?
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  681. Then why hasn't Putin already totally destroyed Ukraine with nukes?
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  682.  leicesterfromabove8925  Are the people there for Russia, or only the (mostly) dictators who rule them?
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  683.  @robertwysocki2073  No, the real problem was the massive British war debt from the first world war (much of which was denominated in US dollars and at an exhorbitant interest rate): this debt meant that while the US enjoyed the Roaring 20s, the UK was crucified on a cross of austerity (indeed a cross of gold from 1925-1931). This was manifest amongst other things in the General Strike of 1926. It was only when the UK ditched the gold standard that its economy was able to recover somewhat, and Appeasement happened because it wasn't until the late 1930s that the UK economy was strong enough to support a programme of rearmament. France was even worse off as (perhaps because of all the wealth they lost lending to the Tsar's regime: loans subsequently repudiated by the Bolsheviks) it stayed on gold (the "franc Poincaré") until 1936, and that (along with horrible demographics, caused by its overly restrictive First World War leave policy) may well have contributed to its easy defeat in 1940.
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  684. Russia never had a significant level of soft power: it always relied on military power to project its influence in the world. A frightening prospect is that in the aftermath of defeat in Ukraine, Russia may go full death cult and actually embrace the prospect of nuclear war, because by then its conventional military will be trashed and nukes will be the only card they have left.
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  685. Jake explains why leading Trumpist politicians are anti-Ukraine, but what explains the stance of ordinary MAGA people? I see two possibilities: 1. They suck up to Russia because their lifestyles are dependent on large amounts of oil and gas, of which Russia still has some of the largest reserves. 2. They dream of returning to the American golden age of the 1950s, and recognize that this came about because World War II had destroyed almost all of America's industrial competitors. Therefore they don't want this century's aggressor empires to be defeated too early, as they want Xi and Putin to do in the 21st century what Hitler and Tojo did during the 20th: start a war that will reduce Europe and Asia to ruins (before being ultimately defeated) while leaving North America conveniently unscathed.
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  686. So an actual Russian then, not even a Pole working for the FSB?
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  687.  @unnamedchannel1237  For starters, some countries are planning to outright ban sales of new ICE cars in the not-too-distant future.
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  688.  @terjeoseberg990  Surely the bottleneck there is pilots rather than planes?
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  689. All British viewers should sign the petition at https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/653502 (0.25% of UK GDP in military aid to Ukraine for the next 4 years).
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  690. Or to put it in Nazi terms, Lavrov is Ribbentrop and Shoigu is Keitel.
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  691. I'm sure NATO leaders will be taking note, as they never themselves had to fight an enemy with such powerful air defenses.
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  692.  @mousasaab2652  You don't know the difference between Russian and Ukrainian?
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  693. The last elections in the Palestinian territories were back in 2006, which is hardly "recent": especially when nearly half of the Gaza Strip's residents hadn't even been born yet when those elections took place!
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  694. Musk was more of a useful idiot: a man who was too arrogant to realize he'd be targeted by the Russian intelligence services, even though he owned a company (Tesla) that (by making EVs aspirational) threatened to strike at the heart of the Russian petrostate's power.
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  695. Are anti-Macron French youth mostly far-right Le Pen supporters, far-left Mélenchon supporters, or something else?
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  696. Small business owners didn't vote for Trump to get rid of immigrants, but rather to terrorize immigrants into working cheap.
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  697. The nightmare scenario for the West is that this becomes a two-sided proxy war, with China placing its awesome industrial power (more than the US and Europe combined) behind Russia's war effort.
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  698.  @lepidoptera9337  Plus of course Iran (as a Shi'a theocracy) won't really care about the mostly-Sunni Palestinians -- they're just using them to their own ends.
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  699. I suspect that in that clip of "the people of Derbent welcoming Putin" that it isn't just the figure of Putin that's fake. Derbent is in southern Dagestan where the Islamic heritage is very strong: even back in the first century of Islam the city was the Caliphate's bastion in the Caucasus. And I'm sure many of us here will have seen that clip from last year's anti-mobilization riots, in which hijab-wearing Dagestani women were giving Putin's security forces the run-around! So why is not one of the women in this recent clip wearing hijab? Either they're a hand-picked audience that aren't representative of the general population of Derbent, or the footage wasn't actually shot in Derbent.
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  700.  @andersgrassman6583  I think the lesson Putin learned from WWII is "if you want to engage in wars of conquest, make sure you have a massive nuclear arsenal first".
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  701.  @andersgrassman6583  I suspect the lesson Putin learned from WWII was "if you want to commit a genocide then make sure you have a gigantic nuclear arsenal, to scare off anyone who may think of trying to stop you."
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  702.  @peteryyz43  I'm guessing (from his ID) that his name is Zoltan Szilvassy: Hungarian?
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  703. The problem is that you can only deport them if they're actually immigrants.
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  704. Yup -- Sunak was basically the fall guy.
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  705. And the British were far more successful in erasing the Irish language than the Russians were in erasing the Ukrainian language. Albeit this was probably helped by the fact that that they had a policy of encouraging the Irish to emigrate, and the most favoured destination for Irish emigrants was the (also English-speaking) USA.
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  706.  @garygraham8373  It wouldn't surprise me if a Ukrainian victory results in the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea being expelled much like the Sudeten Germans after World War II.
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  707. I could probably walk that distance in a couple of hours.
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  708. I doubt it: if China takes Outer Manchuria then the US would likely greenlight Japan to take Sakhalin and the Kuril islands, and China would be back to square one.
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  709.  @AndrewFischer-sz5cb  You mean Chishima Retto?
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  710. The problem is that avoiding a nuclear war is still a higher priority than punishing Russian war crimes.
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  711. How likely is it that Russia will carry on bombing Ukrainian civilians even after their armies are evicted from Ukrainian soil (including Crimea)?
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  712.  @katepro5451  Do you think that's one reason why some European countries are reticent about supporting Ukraine, because of how horrendously destructive a civil war in a nuclear power could be?
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  713.  @katepro5451  Would the nuclear weapons mean that even if russia collapses in civil war it won't be possible for neighbours to take over its territories (eg Finland taking Karelia, Poland and/or Lithuanian taking Kaliningrad, China taking Primorsky or Japan taking Sakhalin)?
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  714. They believe that all Eastern Slavic people belong under Moscow's rule.
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  715. China won't be gaining "access to the deep Pacific": as soon as Vladivostok becomes Haishenwai, the US will greenlight Japan to make Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk Toyohara again, and the Chinese will be back to square one.
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  716. I'm thinking of this montage made back in March: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhqk7JW-I8k
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  717. Fortunately the nazis were defeated before they could develop nuclear weapons.
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  718.  @MarekV82  Didn't the Soviets and their allies ultimately defeat the Ukrainian Insurgent Army by 1960?
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  719. @ My point was merely that Jake shouldn't get too complacent!
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  720. @ What, you support Russia??
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  721.  @CMY187  What, as in such an invasion would destroy the MAGA right's pro-Russia sympathies once and for all, with such people instead chomping at the bit to start shooting Russians in Alaska?
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  722. Pobedobesie (victory mania)!
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  723. I'd love to see the Ukrainians capture Putin's Black Sea palace before the end: "Соборна Українськая держава — Вільна й міцна, від Сяну по Кавказ!"
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  724. It's not just Putin: the whole Russian mindset defines "sovereignty" as meaning something closer to "impunity".
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  725. Note that when Russian racists talk about "black" people they generally aren't referring not to Africans but to Caucasians such as Chechens, Georgians or Armenians. One reason why I detest the common Western usage of "Caucasian" to mean "white" (as opposed to someone actually from the Caucasus).
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  726. I think a lot of the pro-Russian MAGA types just want cheaper oil and gas.
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  727. My guess is they believe their fossil-fuelled lifestyles are under threat from green activists. "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlement to a McHouse and a McCar." – James Howard Kunstler, 2005
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  728. Die Linke aren't much of a surprise, as they're the successors to Soviet Russia's former puppet government in East Germany.
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  729.  @S0ulinth3machin3  Ukraine too spent most of its post-independence history as a highly corrupt country dominated by oligarchs, but the most powerful Ukrainian oligarchs tended to be from the Donbas because that was where the Soviet-era heavy industry was. However, since the Maidan Revolution oligarchy has declined in Ukraine: first in that several Donbas oligarchs turned traitor afterwards, and then in 2019 when Volodymyr Zelensky defeated oligarch Petro Poroshenko in the presidential election. Perhaps Putin invaded because he sensed that Ukraine was finally starting to get its act together and do something about its corruption problem?
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  730.  @tada8092  in Ukrainian of course, and yes I could write it out as well. Although I have found an English version of the song at https://youtu.be/n_ahV0akvYQ
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  731.  @ritacouchcooper2842  Black Americans aren't really immigrants because their ancestors were brought to America against their will as slaves. This is one of the reasons why black Americans are a problematic minority: they have no "duty to assimilate" because their ancestors didn't arrive voluntarily, but they are also too geographically dispersed to become a "nation within a nation" like the Welsh in the UK or the Francophones in Canada.
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  732. I wonder if some of the MAGA Republicans actually want World War III because they believe it'll end much like World War II did, with Europe and Asia in ruins and thus virtual captive markets for American industrial production?
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  733. Maybe they're Tuvans (like Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu) or Buryats?
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  734. Isn't depleted uranium a (weak) alpha emitter, which means that while it's (radiologically) harmless outside the body, it's very dangerous if it gets inside the body (for example if uranium dust is breathed in)?
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  735. Mariupol was actually founded by Greeks who had been deported there from Crimea: the Russians had captured the peninsula from the Ottomans but weren't confident about holding it, so they removed its Christian population to deny them to the Ottomans. Other Crimean residents avoided deportation by either going into hiding or converting to Islam.
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  736.  @irdorath356  You mean Odesa? AFAIK Mariupol didn't exist at all before the Crimean Greeks founded it in the late 18th century.
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  737.  @dweb And isn't Ramzan Kadyrov essentially an Islamist co-opted by the Kremlin?
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  738. Does Putin have photos of Trump raping a child?
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  739. The real reason why Middle Easterners are so difficult to integrate in Europe is the same reason why they can't build functional nation-states in their own region: their pastoralist heritage along with widespread cousin marriage has splintered their society into powerful kin groups, and members of such society are loyal to kin above all else.
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  740. I think the official version has more oomph to it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdANpB9PnY
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  741.  @adamrak7560  I believe that was the inspiration, yes.
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  742. Although bear in mind that one reason why World War II Germany was genocidal, was because they severely reduced Europe's food production by diverting nitrates from fertilizer production to explosives production.
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  743. Жыве Беларусь! ⬜🟥⬜
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  744. I suspect one thing that cost Corbyn a lot of support was a scene from a Labour Party conference of the era, where the room was a veritable sea of Palestinian flags.
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  745.  @grahamstrouse1165  I wonder if Russia's low life expectancy is actually an advantage of them, as it eans they don't have millions of dementia-addled elderly sucking up resources and manpower for their care?
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  746. Isn't it just that the current state of military technology (like during World War I) favours the defender, as advancing tank columns are now easy meat for drones and anti-tank missiles? The Russians didn't realize this (hence the talk of a "3-day special military operation") but nor did the West (because they put Russia's initial failure against Kyiv down to incompetence).
    1
  747. Doesn't make sense to me at all: why would anyone think that Russia's decision to use or not use nukes would be affected by Ukraine using US weapons to hit military targets in Russia's border oblasts (Bryansk, Kursk and Belgorod)?
    1
  748. While some Ukrainian nationalists dream of annexing Kuban (the original Circassian homeland) Ukraine is currently trying with all its might to merely regain its current internationally-recognized territory.
    1
  749. Why do so many right-wing Americans support Russia? I thought of three possibilities: 1. The right they care about most is the right to burn as much fossil fuel as they like, and they thus see Putin (as head of the most powerful petrostate) as a champion against the environmentalists, 2. They believe (or even just hope) that a new world war would lead to the Americans once again enjoying a 1950s-style lack of foreign competition, 3. They believe Putin getting away with genocide in Ukraine would enable America to similarly massacre the people trying to cross illegally from Mexico.
    1
  750. How much do you think the pro-Russia right in western countries is driven by greed for cheap Russian oil and gas?
    1
  751.  @ShawNshawN  Sweden has big problems with recent immigration by Middle Eastern refugees, but in the US and UK the most problematic minorities are long-established ones. The most problematic minority in the US are ghetto blacks, who are if anything more "American" than the whites (given that they descend from slaves imported pre-1808, while the US had mass white immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries), while Britain's most problematic minority are Mirpuris who immigrated from Pakistan shortly after WWII to work in the textile mills of northern England (which have now all closed). I wonder which category France falls into?
    1
  752. And wouldn't the Perekop isthmus be the ideal location for Russia to use a tactical nuke, given that it's a geographic choke point that the Ukrainians would have to pass through to get into Crimea?
    1
  753. I'd say the most accurate translation of "Reich" would be "realm": more specific variants would be "Königreich" for "kingdom" or "Kaiserreich" for "empire" (in the sense of a state with an emperor as head of state). And "Soviet Empire" for example would normally be translated as "Sowjetisches Imperium" not "Sowjetisches Reich".
    1
  754. ​ @phil20_20 the question is whether Medvedev's loony ravings are meant seriously, or if they are just the price of not being pre-emptively assassinated by Putin.
    1
  755. Wasn't the only Russian cruiser in the Black Sea the Moskva, which was of course sunk in April 2022?
    1
  756. The United States?
    1
  757. Unfortunately the West's supply of weapons and ammo is overwhelmingly concentrated in the USA.
    1
  758. Probably because of the Cold War era doctrine that any nuclear power that puts its forces in a hostile nuclear power's backyard (as the Soviets did by putting nukes in Cuba, or as US would be if it put its own forces in Ukraine, as opposed to just arming the Ukrainians) is setting the stage for a nuclear holocaust.
    1
  759. Doug Muder wrote about this dynamic way back in 2004: "Terrorist Strategy 101"
    1
  760.  @spxram4793  Hungary was Putin's first victim in the democratic world: engineering Orbán's rise to power was a dress rehearsal for Brexit and Trump.
    1
  761. Rus' wasn't Ukraine though, even if Kyiv was its most important city for a long time. There is a point though in that Muscovy was kind of a semi-barbarian offshoot of Rus' civilization that came to take it over, in some ways much as Macedon was for classical Greek civilization.
    1
  762.  Say-Palyanytsya  Although hearing of Russia's initial plan to deliberately starve the Middle East (presumably to destabilize Europe by flooding it with starving Muslim refugees) gave me a lot of sympathy for the "від Сяну по Кавказ" claim!
    1
  763. Trump supporters don't care: they voted for him for the purely negative reason of "owning the libs".
    1
  764. And let's not forget that was Portugal's unwinnable colonial wars in Africa that led to the Carnation Revolution...
    1
  765. While countries have boycotted Olympics games in protest at the host country's policies, there's never been a case of a nation being banned from participating AFAIK.
    1
  766. I had two hypotheses on pro-Russia Americans: 1) They see Putin as a champion of the fossil-fuel-powered economy against environmentalists who aim to destroy it, or 2) They want another world war to wreck Europe (and Asia, when China makes its move on Taiwan) so that they end up as ruined captive markets for American industrial products just like they were in the 1950s.
    1
  767. Especially when there are already ISIS terrorists in the Sinai.
    1
  768.  @seanpadgett3053  Surely F-16s are the most-discussed Western fighter jets wrt Ukraine for the same reason that Leopards are the most-discussed Western main battle tanks: because there are more of them (and operated by more different countries) than any other model in Europe?
    1
  769. I'd say it more started with the Great Depression, as that both created the push for warlike expansionism in Germany and Japan, and encouraged appeasement by crippling the economies of the Western democracies. Neville Chamberlain (as Chancellor) spent much of the early- to mid-1930s trying to fix the British economy to the point that it could even support a re-armament programme, as the UK had spent 1925-1931 (in William Jennings Bryan's words) "crucified on a cross of gold". France was even worse off as they clung to the gold standard until 1936, which may be one reason why they fell to the Nazis in 1940.
    1
  770. I suspect the most infamous army though for physical abuse of its own men was the WWII-era Imperial Japanese Army, which likely explains why they were so horrendously atrocity-prone.
    1
  771.  @bjornh4664  Or more likely red stars, given that (AFAIK) the Russian Air Force still uses those.
    1
  772.  @Fromdownunder-dq6he  And the Kremlin has tyrannized Russians for centuries while the Nazis only tyrannized Germans for 12 years.
    1
  773.  @SuperALBSURE  To me it seems clear that the MAGA right actually wants a Russian victory: the question is – WHY?
    1
  774.  @bloggalot4718 In some ways the US Speaker of the House is analogous to the UK Prime Minister.
    1
  775. If Russia was behind Hamas's escalation on October 7th, was the electoral success of Geert Wilders the payoff?
    1
  776. Yup, the US (and other free countries) ought to be tariffing the shit out of China and only China.
    1
  777. Avenge MH17!
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  778. So why aren't Trumpist republicans now trying to outdo the Democrats on support for Ukraine?
    1
  779. Trump was saved from prison by the delay tactics of the Supreme Court which he was able to pack during his 2017-2020 term.
    1
  780.  @awuma  Russia wouldn't be able to keep a re-armament drive secret as Hitler (living in an age before spy satellites) did. Its main advantage today is likely its relatively low life expectancy, as the biggest item of public expenditure now for most Western governments is entitlements for old people (in the US that would be Social Security and Medicare). This age-related expenditure put extreme pressure on Western governments (likely starting with the Germans, because their Baby Boom was pre-WWII thanks to Hitler) to cut other areas of spending, such as factories making artillery shells for example.
    1
  781. I'm reminded of how one of the design flaws of the Messerschmitt 109 fighter aircraft was that the pilot's seat was also a fuel tank.
    1
  782. They got the phrase from a Republican propaganda poster of the Spanish Civil War.
    1
  783.  @jdocean1  Keep your Republican registration though, so you can vote against any pro-Russia candidates in the primary.
    1
  784. More like they see it is unfinished business, because Taiwan is where the Guomindang found refuge after losing the Chinese Civil War. Although breaching the "first island chain" around China is certainly another reason for China to take Taiwan: moving on Outer Manchuria wouldn't work because if they did that the US would likely back Japan to reclaim Karafuto and Chishima (aka Sakhalin and the Kurils).
    1
  785. The man with the recorder at the end was playing "March of Ukrainian Nationalists", which dates back to 1929.
    1
  786. Because it has lots of nukes. Next question?
    1
  787. The real problem is that the Arsenal of Democracy no longer exists: shut down to save money when national budgets were being strained by the ever rising elderly population (pensions, health care, and nursing homes for dementia sufferers). The pathetic state of the Bundeswehr today is often blamed on an anti-patriotic attitude in Germany stemming from WWII guilt, but that's clearly wrong as the Bundeswehr was pretty decent during the Cold War. It fell to pieces after reunification, perhaps because (thanks to Hitler) Germany's Baby Boom was before WWII, meaning the bill for all those retirees came earlier than in other Western countries.
    1
  788.  @DKFX1  The food shortage caused by the Nazi occupation of Ukraine was probably the main factor.
    1
  789.  @DKFX1  Oops, I meant during World War II of course. Not sure if the Soviet Union under Stalin participated in any other major wars (other than the border skirmishes with Japan, which were kind of a prelude to World War II). While the Korean War took place during Stalin's rule, I don't think the Soviets participated in that war.
    1
  790. I thought baby boomers were normally defined as 1946-1963: it would make a difference to me because I was born in 1980. Am I the ass end of Gen X, or a (very) geriatric millennial?
    1
  791. Russia is a culture which particularly prizes blind obedience to authority, to the point that Russian who insist on thinking for themselves are derided as "mentally Ukrainian".
    1
  792. Wasn't "bringing democracy to Iraq" mainly a project of the neocons, who are mostly very pro-Ukraine these days and are very hostile to the isolationist MAGA Republicans? And note that one of the reasons why Saddam Hussein was seen as fair game in 2003 was because he was then (as Putin is now) the most recent dictator to try to wipe someone else's country off the map (Kuwait in 1990).
    1
  793. I'd say more "it's about the car culture, baby".
    1
  794. AIUI the real problem is all the gun-toting MAGA nutters: when Trump had his second impeachment he escaped conviction mainly because enough GOP senators were forced to vote to acquit by MAGA thugs who threatened their families.
    1
  795.  @JakeBroe  Do you really think that if this war does result in Russia breaking apart in another Russian Civil War, that it would stay broken up and not have one of the factions reunite it (much as in the first Russian Civil War, Lenin was able to take over all the old Russian Empire minus Finland, the Baltic states, Poland and Moldova)?
    1
  796. Actually the British in 1939 were confident of victory, given their global Empire and domination of the seas. Nobody was expecting Fall Gelb to be such a smashing success for the Germans!
    1
  797. To what extent is Kamala Harris's unpopularity the issue, in the sense that she's Biden's VP and thus the most obvious candidate to replace him?
    1
  798. Jihadists reward their fallen heroes with a houri-filled Jannah, and the Norsemen of old rewarded them with Valhalla, but I wasn't aware Russian Orthodoxy had any kind of reward in the afterlife for those who die in battle. The speech here seems like it might be very effective at demoralizing the West though, because it gives the impression of Russian society as a death cult like WWII-era Japan, but of course we can't deal with Russia the same way we dealt with Japan because Russia has a huge nuclear arsenal. Are people here sure that the speech wasn't deliberately leaked to the West for the purpose of destroying morale?
    1
  799.  @JakeBroe  Elon Musk did more than anyone else to make EVs (Tesla!) an object of aspiration, which was likely why Putin targeted him (as EVs are a threat to the power of petrostates generally). He was likely influenced by Putin-financed fake billionaires posing as Silicon Valley VCs, who took advantage of Elon's monstrous ego to trick him into destroying himself.
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  800. Wouldn't that worry the Ukrainians though: if Poland were to demand Grodno back then might they not later demand back Lwów (currently Ukrainian Lviv)?
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  801. Because it's actually SUMY (with the Y pronounced like the "i" in English "bit") not SUMI.
    1
  802. Does a Storm Shadow have a big enough warhead to destroy the Kerch Strait bridge once and for all?
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  803.  @tonupharry  Yup -- the foreign power that Epstein worked for (most likely Saudi Arabia) had no use for Trump, so they sold the relevant kompromat to Putin.
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  804. I was thinking that Putin had videos of Trump raping kids at Jeffrey Epstein's island, but I'm not sure even this would force Trump to behave the way he is.
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  805.  @rachelnise2473  It's also when Ukraine started adopting OUN-derived symbolism like the now-famous "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!"
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  806.  @thilomanten8701 Do you think rank-and-file MAGA voters see Putin as their champion defender against the environmentalists bent on forcing them out of their monster SUVs and otherwise destroying their way of life?
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  807.  @mauricehodgson3143  Reminds me of how single hits (which penetrated ammunition stores) totally destroyed HMS Hood and USS Arizona in 1941.
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  808. Because Russia can threaten to nuke the US but Ukraine can't threaten to nuke Iran.
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  809. Isn't the main argument against confiscating Russian assets the concern that it may make governments (and wealthy individuals) in the Global South less willing to use Western banks, out of fear that their assets may be confiscated if they do something the West disapproves of?
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  810.  @MamaDisco1313  The global South governments and individuals probably don't trust the West to confiscate assets only from states which "invade another country to commit genocide". Plus many likely believe that that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza with the full support of the (hypocritical) West.
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  811.  @MamaDisco1313  My point is that if the West starts confiscating Russian assets then some other non-Western governments may freak out and fear they're next, even if those governments haven't committed crimes comparable to Russia's.
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  812. No wonder the Ukrainians call them orcs.
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  813. Maybe what she (and other isolationist Republicans) really think is "wasn't it wonderful for America in the 1950s, when Europe and Asia were in ruins and the world was thus a virtual captive market for our products?" Perhaps they want Xi and Putin to do in the 21st century what Hitler and Tojo did in the 20th?
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  814. Do "no freedom of the press" in Russia mean merely that the press is censored (authoritarianism) or does it mean that the press is outright controlled by the state (totalitarianism)?
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  815.  @IanMoone46n2  Wot, 'coz they ban holocaust denial?
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  816. Isn't the West slowly boiling Putin's frog so that he doesn't panic and reach for the nuclear red button?
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  817. How much of the loss of steelmaking capacity was driven by Chinese dumping (in 2015 China's overcapacity in steel production was roughly twice the entire EU's total capacity), and how much was due to environmentalists and NIMBYs?
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  818.  @warwickbrown18  It was understandable why a lot of people in Donbas were pissed at the Maidan (because Yanukovych was from the region and had lavished it with subsidies at the expense of the rest of Ukraine) but they were stupid to think that Russia would do anything for them.
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  819. How were Germans accepted back into the civilized world after the even worse atrocities of the Nazis?
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  820. The Nazis Rashists entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw Kharkiv, Mariupol, Odesa and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They have sown the wind, and so they shall reap the whirlwind.
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  821.  @icle-ytir Yup, there's a reason why a right-wing militia like Azov became prominent in the first place, as they were the only guys determined to fight for Ukraine at the time.
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  822.  AndyWoohoo666  A reference to those Hero Wars ads that seem to dominate when I use YouTube?
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  823. The big nightmare is that in today's world it is a tyranny (China) that is the world's greatest industrial power -- more powerful than the US and Europe combined!
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  824. An end to USD domination would be a disaster for American global influence and for Wall Street, but it wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing for ordinary Americans.
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  825. Indeed: Slovakia was ruled by Hungary for close to a thousand years.
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  826. Muscovy renamed itself "Russia" in order to claim to be the sole successor of Kyiv Rus', while the Ukrainians (and Belarusians and Poles) coined the epithet "Moskal" in defiance of this claim.
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  827.  @sergiyrospysdiyenko6224  I thought "kacap" derived from a Turkic word for "butcher"?
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  828.  @leav388 The strange thing is that Hitler wanted to crush Czechoslovakia, and was privately outraged at the Munich Agreement feeling that Chamberlain had cheated him out of his war. And if Hitler had failed in an attempt to conquer the Czechs in 1938, it wasn't very likely to have brought down his regime, given how inept Germany's anti-Hitler plotters tended to be. It may have still just delayed the big war by a couple of years, much like when Mussolini's Italy foiled Hitler's attempt to take over Austria in 1934. And if Nazi Germany had collapsed in 1938, then it may have been just a prelude to a World War II where the USSR is the main enemy, given that America was still in the grip of isolationism at the time.
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  829.  @mikoto7693 Yup -- at least we in the UK don't have a strong pro-Russia fifth column in our country.
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  830. My guess is that the only right they really care about is the right to burn as much fossil fuel as they bloody well like, and believe that Putin (as ruler of a petrostate) will defend that right for them against the environmentalists who seek to take it away. "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlement to a McHouse and a McCar." -- James Howard Kunstler, 2005
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  831. Also that Trump pulled 90% of US forces out of Afghanistan (making the Taliban reconquest inevitable) while leaving 10% behind as a poison pill for Biden.
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  832. Tucker Carlson owes his position to Putin, as it was Russian hackers who engineered the Fox News sex scandal that allowed Carlson and Hannity to replace Ailes and O'Reilly.
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  833. ​ @ollelle880 In Hitler's eyes Austrians were Germans of course. And a substantial number of Austrians agreed with him on that point, while (since 2014 and especially since 2022) almost no Ukrainians see themselves and Ukraine as part of Russia.
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  834. The problem with that is that many Ukrainians in the '90s still saw Russia as a brother nation: it was only after Russia stole Crimea in 2014 that Ukraine began to develop a united and anti-Russian national identity: one which looked for inspiration to the old Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. Much of Ukraine's old army (and even more so its navy) had then crumbled (or worse, defected to the Russian side), which is why the current Ukrainian Army's anthem is known as "March of the New Army". It's also no coincidence that this song was a variation of the OUN anthem "March of Ukrainian Nationalists", and that the Ukrainian military officially adopted the "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to Heroes!" call-and-response (which also has OUN origins) in 2018.
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  835.  @steveselectricalstuff884  Not money but kompromat, which in Trump's case probably originated on Epstein's island.
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  836. @SomethingBlonde Peter Thiel bought JD Vance his seat in the Senate.
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  837.  @TheFeldhamster  The west was duped in 2014 much as Neville Chamberlain was in 1938, because Crimea's population is majority ethnic-Russian just as the Sudetenland's was majority ethnic-German.
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  838. Starmer is being attacked over a new 20% inheritance tax on farmland worth over £3m. However, the mean size of an English farm is about 220 acres, which (given the average price of English farmland is £11,000 per acre) corresponds to only $2.42m. And the median size of an English farm is only about 50 acres, so this new tax will mainly just hit multi-millionaires who bought up large amounts of land as a tax dodge. I guess this shows how difficult it can be to tax the rich, as they always have sob stories they can forward to sympathisers in the press.
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  839. It's not that easy because Russians have been taught for centuries to see blind and unquestioning obedience to authority as the highest virtue: in fact a common epithet used against Russians who disagree with this is "mentally Ukrainian"!
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  840. Wasn't one justification for Transnistria's existence that in parts of it at least the Eastern Slavic (Russian + Ukrainian) population outnumbers the Moldovan/Romanian population? Maybe those bits of Transnistria at least shoud become part of Ukraine rather than Moldova?
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  841.  @terryhand  Although didn't Russian apartments actually get more cramped as time went on, with Khrushchev flats being smaller than Stalin flats, while Brezhnev flats were even tinier?
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  842. The UK screwed itself in 1925 when it tried to go back on the gold standard at the pre-WWI rate when the economy no longer supported that. Chamberlain spent most of the early 1930s as Chancellor (equivalent to US Treasury Secretary) fixing the economy to the point that it was even capable of supporting a re-armament drive. It's also notable that the Nazis were able to re-arm so fast in part because they set up a shell company (MEFO) in order to hide their massive deficit spending from the outside world.
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  843. What we need to do for a start is to create a "China-free product" certification that could be applied to consumer goods: I'm sure millions of people across the Free World would be willing to pay more for such products.
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  844.  @muhammedallah386  My guess is that Putin has enough kompromat on Trump to send him to prison for life.
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  845. I wonder if some of those Syrian fighters might want more revenge against Russia and might be opening to joining the Ukrainian army?
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  846. Actually I'd say Ukraine is still only the second most important geopolitical theater now: the MOST important is the Taiwan Strait.
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  847. What caused the resurgence of isolationism in the GOP?
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  848. I thought it was more like "tay-SHAY-rah"?
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  849.  @ianbruce9603  We're in agreement on which syllable carries the accent: my claim is that "ei" in Portuguese sounds more like the English "ay" sound.
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  850. What should Ukraine and the West do if Russia refuses to make peace even after being evicted from Ukraine's pre-2014 territory: should Ukraine push towards Putin's Black Sea palace and ultimately to the Georgian border?
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  851. Seems like there's a flaw in the US constitution that neuters the impeachment process, in that it's impossible to convict a President if his own loyalists make up at least a third of the Senate.
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  852.  @jonlee2217  Hitler was very fortunately defeated before nuclear weapons became a reality: note that even the USA (with resources that the Germans could barely even dream of) was unable to build an atomic bomb in time to drop it on Germany.
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  853. Do you think the GLSDB delays may be a major factor in the change of heart over ATACMS?
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  854. This desire for secrecy may be one reason why Russia's initially invaded with an inadequate force.
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  855.  @KaDaJxClonE  He was also hoping that Europe's two evil empires (Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR) would destroy each other, but the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact foiled that plan.
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  856. Yup, I'm sure a lot of Israelis will start thinking that Kahane was right...
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  857. Given Putin's attempts to starve the Middle East with a Black Sea blockade (presumably to try to flood Europe with more refugees) I've thought it would be nice if this war ends with Ukraine sharing a border with Georgia! "From the San to the Caucasus" as the song goes...
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  858. I'd say the equivalent to 1938 was 2014, as the Sudetenland was majority ethnic-German just as Crimea is majority ethnic-Russian.
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  859. 15:15 -- "How the heck do you convince Africans, and Muslims from the Middle East, to come to Europe to fight for your (Russian) empire?" Given that most African and Middle Eastern countries have economies that (like Russia's) are based on exporting natural resources (oil, gas or minerals), perhaps it's a case of (to bastardize Karl Marx) "natural resource exporters of the world, unite!" ? 23:42 -- "This is treason, point blank, no debate." -- YES!
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  860. The same thing that's stopping NATO invading Russia: nukes.
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  861. Slava Natsiyi! Smert' Voroham!
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  862. I thought that a missile that is advertised as a "hypersonic missile" is one that is capable of maneuvering at hypersonic speed? What you describe would be known simply as a "ballistic missile".
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  863.  @ilirllukaci5345  My point is that all ballistic missiles (except for very short range ones) travel at hypersonic speed, but aren't generally advertised as "hypersonic missiles".
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  864. So the bottom 90% in North Korea are the "hostile class"? Shades of the helots in ancient Sparta...
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  865. The downfall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is that all votes had to be unanimous: the infamous "liberum veto" principle!
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  866.  @geretstarseeker453  Are Germans today more likely to view East Germany as a Soviet occupation or as a home-grown dictatorship?
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  867.  @AnnaLevina123  Joseph Stalin and Stepan Bandera both co-operated with Hitler for the same time period (1939-1941), but only the latter is commonly branded a Nazi collaborator...
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  868. It's more likely in my view that Putin OWNS Trump in the sense of having kompromat on him.
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  869. The Arabic script omits most vowels (while it does have the harakat diacritics to fully specify vowels, they're only generally used in the Qur'an and children's books) and while this isn't much of a problem for the Arabic language itself, it makes that script ill-suited to Turkish: because of these issues 19th century Ottoman reformers were already considering Latin script for Turkish. A famous example of the deficiency of the old Ottoman Arabic script is that محمد پاشا اولدو corresponded to both Mehmet Paşa oldu ("Muhammad became a Pasha") and Mehmet Paşa öldü ("Muhammad Pasha died")! By contrast, the Cyrillic script was designed with Slavic languages in mind, and (given that it was used in Kyivan Rus) the Ukrainians will likely be reluctant to ditch it, as they arguably have at least a good a claim to it as the Muscovites do. Of course Turkic countries formerly ruled by Moscow (such as Kazakhstan, or should we now be spelling it Qazaqstan?) are mostly in the process of adopting Latin script, with correspondence with Turkey itself likely being at least part of the inspiration.
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  870.  @ArmySigs  Indeed, the level of discrimination suffered by Sunnis in Iran is comparable to the level of discrimination against Iranian Jews.
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  871.  @TB-zf7we  That was indeed the Bolsheviks' plan, as (being the good Marxists that they were) they believed they'd be far more likely to succeed at building socialism in an advanced industrial country like Germany, than in a backward primary producer like Russia.
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  872. Even scarier given that Nazi Germany never had nuclear ICBMs.
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  873. In World War II they were getting vast amounts of US Lend-Lease, while in this war it's going to their enemy.
    1
  874. ​ @robertneil715  The UK equivalent to the US Speaker of the House is arguably the Prime Minister, which is an even more powerful office.
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  875. I expect last month's massacre in Israel was a big factor in Geert's electoral success, given that hating Muslims is his biggest selling point.
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  876. I thought it was Marjorie Traitor Greene?
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  877. The Ukrainian army's anthem is a different song again, sometimes known as "We Were Born in a Great Hour". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdANpB9PnY
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  878. ​ @robfromladner726 No way is it something as petty as a pee tape: maybe Putin has photos of Trump (perhaps from Epstein's island) raping underage girls?
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  879.  @chrisjones8791  That's a different dam.
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  880. Europeans may buy American weapons for Ukraine in the short term because they can't afford to wait for their own military industries to be built back up.
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  881. Except that most of Russia's fifth columnists in the West are blackmailed not just bribed. If they don't do what Putin tells them to do, then Putin will put the photos on the internet and they're going to prison for years.
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  882. I wouldn't blame the present politics of European countries but rather their past politics, such as all European countries running down their military industry (because no-one expected another WWI-style peer-level war in Europe), or Germany allowing itself (out of nuclear power phobia) to get addicted to Russian gas.
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  883. Zelensky may wish to tell Trump something secret but not vitally important, because (if Trump does tell the Russians) they could use it to prove his treachery.
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  884. Although Trump doesn't seem to be a territorial expansionist.
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  885. Perhaps Lukashenko is a rat who has seen the writing on the wall and is now trying to flee the sinking ship "Russkii Mir"?
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  886.  @0e32 Isn't it now the Hungarians more than the Turks who are playing silly-buggers w.r.t. Sweden's NATO application?
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  887. What would you say to those that it is way too dangerous for a nuclear power (such as NATO, considered collectively) to directly fight against another nuclear power, because whichever side ends up losing will escalate to nuclear war?
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  888.  @randym7961  Indeed: hypergolic rocket fuels are seriously nasty stuff. Better to go with LOX/kerosene or LOX/LH2 for space launchers, or solid fuels for ballistic missiles (as with the US Minuteman).
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  889. Because they're too far away from Ukrainian territory.
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  890. "Lakh" by the way is an Indian term for 100,000...
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  891.  @ArmedSpaghet  Zaporizhzhia
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  892. Actually "rasputitsa" literally means "time without roads". The equivalent Ukrainian term for mud season is "bezdorizhzhia" (бездорі́жжя).
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  893.  @JakeBroe  Perhaps we in the West should dump the Russian-derived name "Kazakhstan" in favour of the native "Qazaqstan"?
    1
  894. Why do Western leaders say they're afraid of "escalation" rather than spelling out clearly what they actually fear, which is nuclear war?
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  895. Anyone starting to wonder if Musk and/or Putin fixed the November election for Trump?
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  896. India 1 - Russia 0!
    1
  897.  @JakeBroe  I suspect Russia is also relying on "King Gas" to win the war for them much as the Confederacy put their faith in "King Cotton".
    1
  898. And it looks like Russian soldiers today are almost as incompetent as Arab soldiers.
    1
  899. Wasn't it threats from the Saudis that deterred Western banks from confiscating Russian money like that?
    1
  900.  @edwardmiessner6502  I'm guessing you read the book "The Failure of Presidential Democracy" by Juan Linz and Arturo Valenzuela?
    1
  901. The real nightmare is that manufacturing hyperpower China helps Russia as much as the West helps Ukraine.
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  902.  @JakeBroe  I could see Chechnya (or should we be saying Ichkeria?) breaking away along with Dagestan: where else could you imagine seceding?
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  903. The US Speaker of the House is in some ways more like a UK Prime Minister than a UK Speaker.
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  904. Is it a coincidence that many of the far-right MAGA types are big fans of the book "Camp of the Saints", whose message is essentially that countries perish if they are unwilling to commit genocide?
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  905. What's with the flag of Free Belarus on the truck that opens this video?
    1
  906. Aren't many Russian ICBMs liquid fuelled, meaning they would require more maintenance than the solid-fuel Minuteman missiles in the US arsenal?
    1
  907. Oil money?
    1
  908. Given talk of Russia having ambitions for the genocide of the Ukrainian people, why mightn't "all of Ukraine" (as in "every city and town of more than 5000 inhabitants") be targeted by Russian nuclear weapons? On the basis that Russia would still have enough nukes to deter NATO from avenging Ukraine?
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  909. If it's a single-use jet-propelled weapon then how is it a "drone" rather than a cruise missile?
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  910. ​ @rumplstiltztinkerstein Putin claims that (self-identifying) Ukrainians are an inherently Nazi nation that must be destroyed. Of course he is wrong about Ukrainians, but a similar argument about Palestinians would likely be right, in the sense that the Palestinian nation was literally born in the fight against Zionism. De-Nazifying Germany after 1945 was possible because the Nazis had taken over a 62-year-old nation-state, and this old Germany could return once the Nazism was peeled off. By contrast, what would even remain of the Palestinian identity if you take away the glorification of terrorism and "martyrdom", the map of Israel painted in Palestinian flag colours, and the key representing the fantasy of returning to homes that often no longer even exist?
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  911.  @Stepbacktrey  So I'm guessing the answer was "no" then: it's just I can't imagine that even the Bolsheviks would hang someone merely for possessing a Ukrainian-language book (unless the book had nationalist or otherwise anti-communist content)...
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  912. ​ @dr.killmoretreeratologist8848  Wasn't the slogan "Slava Ukraini" (and particularly when paired with "Heroyam Slava") long associated with the OUN and UPA, to the point that even as late as 2018 its official adoption by the Ukrainian military was controversial? It was the fact that @yurill578's great-grandfather said that slogan before the Bolsheviks murdered him that made me wonder if he was an OUN or UPA member (as those organizations did after all have hundreds of thousands of members, which is very high considering these were clandestine resistance organizations).
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  913.  @jerseyshoredroneservices225  A fair number of those are Belarusians ⬜🟥⬜ who aim ultimately to liberate their own country from Putin's puppet dictator.
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  914. Can't someone who hires a hitman to kill someone be done for murder just as much as if they'd personally pulled the trigger?
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  915. @ No government in Moscow has ever been voted out of office.
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  916. Jimmy Carter was a much better ex-President than he was a President.
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  917.  @jonson856  If you're going that far I'm surprised you didn't also demand they give up Krasnodar Krai to Ukraine (thus losing access to the Black Sea altogether) and the whole of Sakhalin Oblast to Japan.
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  918. ​ @jonson856  I don't think Georgia should take any Russian territory except perhaps North Ossetia: Krasnodar Krai was originally colonized by cossacks from Ukraine, which is why the song "March of Ukrainian Nationalists" (a version of which has been the official Ukrainian Army anthem since 2017) speaks of Ukraine "from the San to the Caucasus". Although the genuine indigenous population of that territory would be the Circassians.
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  919. ​ @jonson856  I was imagining that if Ukraine was to get Kuban then they'd logically get a corridor through Rostov to connect it to the rest of their territory (especially when I mentioned cutting Russia out of the Black Sea as an objective). Oh, and the survivors of Imperial Russia's genocide of Circassians mostly ended up in Turkey and other Middle Eastern countries: maybe if the West were to support a Ukrainian claim on Kuban then they'd insist they'd give the Circassians the same right of return as the Crimean Tatars?
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  920.  @questionmaker5666  The western part of Ukraine is the most rabidly nationalistic (you see lots of red/black Ukrainian Insurgent Army flags there) which would be another reason why I don't think Poland would want it back.
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  921.  @carolwilliams8511  Why do you think Western countries were unwilling to send their own troops to Ukraine? Fear of their own electorates, or fear that Russia would respond by escalating to nuclear war?
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  922. It's not that they believe him: it's that they want cheap Russian oil and gas and are willing to sacrifice Ukraine to get it.
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  923. Given that this invasion means that Russia and Ukraine will be bitter enemies for the foreseeable future, there's no reason to keep the Kerch bridge in place if Ukraine's objective is to restore the pre-2014 borders: would what little trade Ukraine would want to do with Russia be worth the threat of the Russians re-invading Crimea across the bridge? On the other hand, if Ukraine did get into a position where it was retaking Crimea, might blowing the bridge be a signal to reassure Russia that they weren't planning to roll on right through into the Kuban, in pursuit of that old Ukrainian nationalist aim of extending Ukrainian territory all the way to the Caucasus? (While I think such an aim could be considered morally justified to ensure that Russia can never again try to starve innocent third parties in the Middle East and Africa, I suspect the risk of nuclear war would increase dramatically if Ukraine tried to take pre-2014 Russian territory.)
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  924.  @c.rutherford  I think it goes back to Muscovy's struggle to throw off the Tatar yoke: for example they introduced serfdom (after most of western Europe had abolished it) because of their need to support a continuous line of defence (near the Ugra and Oka rivers) to protect Moscow and its immediate hinterland against nomadic invaders.
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  925. It's like claiming the USS Arizona was "damaged" by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor in 1941.
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  926. ​ @MDuarte-vp7bm Napoleon's invasion in 1812 was a single thrust through Belarus to Moscow (never going near Ukraine) while Japan in 1904 of course attacked in the Far East.
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  927. The resurgence in American isolationism is in part because of a (justified) backlash against the adventures of the neocons in Iraq et al, and in part a result of the FSB hacking Fox News in 2014.
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  928. @iuranescitcuria Perhaps MAGA isolationism is a backlash to the neocon interventionism that gave us the Iraq disaster?
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  929. Plus they were assassinating Ukrainian patriots pretty much from the founding of the Soviet Union: Petlyura shot dead in Paris, Konovalets blown to bits in Rotterdam, Bandera gassed to death in Munich...
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  930. That footage is also definitely not in the UK (even if it does feature UK-provided vehicles) because the vehicles are driving on the right!
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  931. The problem is that this particular bank robber is wearing a suicide vest (Russia's nuclear arsenal).
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  932.  @TheBonecrusherz  Russia-sized nuclear arsenals don't come cheap (and Russia itself only has one because it inherited it from the USSR). And while I agree that nukes aren't a reason to let Russia keep ill-gotten land, they do unfortunately mean that a 1945-style solution to the Russian threat isn't possible.
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  933. MAGA types just want cheap Russian oil and gas
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  934.  @Nathan-lw1kv  I don't think it's so much tax cuts that Trump supporters want, as cheaper oil and gas for (for example) their monster SUVs and pickup trucks.
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  935. I think he'll be talking a lot about the coming US election in his next Q&A video!
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  936. Especially when future unmanned combat aircraft will be easily able to pull G-forces that would kill a human pilot.
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  937.  @Quetzalcoatl-tq7su  Plus Putin is using the supposed "Nazi collaborator" Bandera to justify his invasion of Ukraine, overlooking that Hitler double-crossed Bandera only a couple of weeks after he double-crossed Stalin.
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  938.  @TheOmegaXicor  Given that the main Cold War II enemy (China) has as much manufacturing capacity as the United States and Europe combined, it should be obvious that the US needs all the allies it can get!
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  939. I expect China probably has a least a few nice resorts surely? It might have been a different story if China was still doing the Zero Covid thing (and was therefore closed to all foreign visitors, as Zero Covid countries had to be).
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  940.  @tatkkyo9911  I was thinking that "charge" was a reference to Old Sparky.
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  941. I'm guessing our host doesn't like Trump much...
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  942.  @mal2ksc  Yup, at least this way the weaponry gets used for its intended purpose: killing Russian invaders!
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  943. USAAF to be pedantic: the USAF didn't come into existence until after World War II ended.
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  944. ​​ @ZER0ZER0SE7EN it seems like most of the West's geopolitical adversaries are either existing civilization-states (such as Russia and China) or insurgents who aspire to create a civilization-state (such as Islamists who want to create a pan-Islamic caliphate). The West itself on the other hand hasn't had its own civilization-state since the Frankish kingdom was broken up into France, Burgundy and Germany.
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  945. Are there any UK-imposed restrictions on Ukraine's use of UK-supplied weapons, or are the relevant restrictions US-imposed?
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  946. Doesn't always work that way -- for example in Russian an unstressed "o" is pronounced "a" -- but Ukrainian is pretty phonetic. Just remember that "i" is pronounced like the "ea" in English "meat" while "y" is pronounced like the "i" in English "bit".
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  947.  @irishcanuck9489 Although on the flip side Trump is such an utterly shameless guy that I struggle to see how Putin or anyone else would actually be able to blackmail him.
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  948. At least one of the things that used to give China a huge amount of soft power (ie Zero Covid) ended up collapsing.
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  949. Netanyahu is also massively corrupt to the point that prison is a real possibility if he loses power.
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  950. Unfortunately Ukraine is even worse, as it doesn't have those Muslim and indigenous Siberian ethnic minorities that boost Russia's numbers.
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  951. Both Napoleon and Hitler were also unable to turn Russia's oppressed masses against the state: Napoleon because the point of his invasion was to force Russia into his Continental System embargo of the UK (which meant he had to keep it intact) and Hitler because he aimed to commit an enormous genocide to free up Ukrainian grain and Caucasus oil for use in his war against the UK and USA.
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  952. Is it even possible to kick a country out of the UN?
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  953. I suspect a lot of the leading supporters of Russia in the West only do so because Putin has pictures of them raping a child.
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  954. I think some of the MAGA types view the Russian petrostate as a potential ally that will defend their fossil-fuelled lifestyles against the environmentalists.
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  955.  @Thetequilashooter1  Especially when the US's own arms industry will likely need to build up to be ready for a new war in the Far East! While Europe should be able to build up their arms industry to be able to fight off Russia by themselves, there's no way that Japan and South Korea could fight off China without American help.
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  956. Aren't the Nazis the people who -- you know -- actually invaded other people's countries?
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  957. How much is the problem simply that Western countries no longer have the ability to manufacture millions of artillery shells, presumably because they didn't expect there to be any more peer-level land wars that would need them? It also has me wondering if Russia conspired with China to flood world markets with below-cost steel so that Western steel industries would be driven out of business.
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  958.  @nothandmade9686  It would have been fitting if "Revenge for Salisbury" had been written on the Storm Shadows sent to Ukraine.
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  959. Many of our staunchest Brexiteers have an obsession with World War II similar to that of the Russians: I wonder if the Kremlin backed Brexit because they believed (wrongly as it turned out) that these people would fall for Russian propaganda about "Nazi Ukraine"?
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  960.  @SpringIsBACK  Wasn't it not so much the Pax Americana as the Pax Atomica, with nuclear MAD preventing major powers fighting one another?
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  961. Also China is desperate to export as much as possible (to the point that economists are speaking of a "Second China Shock") to compensate for the effect of their real estate crash.
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  962. I'm guessing the point is about equipment that is too heavy to be lifted by a helicopter.
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  963. How many people here have seen that map from Reddit of Russia broken up into 30 countries, with Finland doubled in size and Japan annexing the entirety of Sakhalin Oblast?
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  964. We didn't have a such a large elderly population (and especially a population in nursing homes with dementia) to burden our economies then.
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  965. Reminds me of Germany's Michael offensive (aka the Kaiserschlacht) in 1918: the Germans put everything into the attack because they knew the clock was now ticking: they knew they were done for unless they could win the war before the Americans arrived in force. Similarly, I suspect Russia now is desperately trying to win the war before the Bradleys and western MBTs can arrive on the Ukrainian battlefield.
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  966. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_of_Ukrainian_Nationalists
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  967. Isn't the post-2020 border crisis fundamentally about asylum seekers (overwhelmingly not Mexican, and a good chunk not even Latin American) not the more traditional kind of illegal immigrants who come to America to work and live under the radar? I wonder if the more accurate parallel may be with when Lukashenko tried to destabilize the EU on Putin's behalf by flying Middle Eastern migrants into Belarus and then pushing them across the Polish border?
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  968. Or maybe they hate Ukraine because had family members killed during World War II by the UPA?
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  969. China?
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  970. Wouldn't Georgia be ineligible for NATO membership as long as Abkhazia and South Ossetia are occupied by Russia?
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  971. Actually the Ukrainian national identity really started to solidify (and harden against Russia) after 2014. Note it was in 2018 that the Ukrainian army replaced the Soviet-era greeting "Wish you health, comrade!" with the OUN's greeting "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to heroes!", and also adopted a variation of "March of Ukrainian Nationalists" as its anthem.
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  972.  @jemilambi  The Ukrainians were more empowered versus the ruling elite than the Russians or Belarusians because their ruling elite was split into two factions (pro-Western and pro-Russian), likely because in the 19th century western Ukraine was ruled not by Russia but by Austria. The revolutions of 2004 and 2013 involved the masses supporting the pro-Western elite faction against the pro-Russian faction. After 2004 the Russians accepted the setback and their faction retook Ukraine in 2010. After 2013 the Russians stole Crimea and started the Donbas war, thus marginalizing the pro-Russian faction in Ukraine.
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  973.  @skipperclinton1087  And there's a reason why the US started doing this in 1945: think of what happened on August 6 that year. (Or more to the point, think of what the Soviets did in 1949, as that's really what was significant.)
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  974. Except those Russian ships won't have come from the Black Sea in the first place. Russia's Black Sea Fleet has been trapped there ever since the Turks closed the Bosporus to warships.
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  975. No -- the word for "death" in both Russian and Ukrainian is "smert".
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  976.  @ananamu2248  Although Trump is such a shameless guy that I struggle to imagine what he could be blackmailed with.
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  977.  @randomclick2826  Russia's abortion rate is one of the highest in the world.
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  978.  @theslavbeing335  Shades of WWII-era Japan...
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  979.  @geoffsimpkins7650  And also because the West Germans knew full well that if they revolted against the Western Allies they'd be tossing themselves into Stalin's jaws.
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  980.  @chetpomeroy1399  The Wirtschaftswunder happened largely because Hitler encouraged the Germans to have as many kids as possible, but very few kids will have been born immediately after the war in ruined, occupied Germany. This means that by the late '50s and early '60s West Germany had lots of young adults eager to work hard and few dependent children to drain the country's resources. The Chinese economic miracle 40 years later had a very similar demographic basis, as the pro-natalist policies under Mao gave way to the one-child policy. But now it's coming to an end because the swollen generation born under Mao is becoming too old to work: perhaps that caused the CCP to look to "Zero Covid" as a new way to justify their rule?
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  981.  @haydnwilde  Although Germany and Japan may have been tempted to revert to their bad old warmongering ways if they didn't have the Soviet menace towering over them. The Union totally defeated and occupied the Confederacy in the American Civil War but was unable to impose Radical Reconstruction. That likely wouldn't have been the case if there had been a USSR-analog then (ie an imperial Haiti that ended up occupying part of the former Confederacy: let's say everything south of a line from Charleston to New Orleans).
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  982.  @stefaniew.1516  in the 1970s all three defeated Axis powers had left wing terrorist groups made up of young people disgusted by the crimes of their parents' generation: the Red Army Faction in West Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy and the Japanese Red Army.
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  983.  @stefaniew.1516  I'm not sure I said anything that contradicts what you just said.
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  984. There's also the fact that many of the European Senate-equivalents have far less power, plus the fact that US-style presidential democracies have potential conflicts between the President and Congress (as they're separately elected) that do not exist in parliamentary democracies.
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  985. All the ex-Soviet bloc (including both Russia and Ukraine) has a shortage of young people because of how birthrates collapsed after the fall of communism. In fact I believe Ukraine actually specifically prefers to recruit older men so that younger men are more likely to reproduce. (Note that one reason why France was so unwilling to resist Hitler was because they had a shortage of young men in the late 1930s: they didn't just suffer the heaviest casualties of any Western Allied nation, but more of them were killed before they had the chance to bear children. Their demographics were so awful that one French general wrote a book Force Noire arguing that France's only hope of holding off Germany was to source most of its army manpower from its African colonies.)
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  986. I'm guessing the Founders made a blunder in that they failed to foresee that a President couldn't be removed by impeachment if his own loyalists made up at least a third of the Senate. I guess it ties in with how they disapproved of political parties (which they called "factions") in general.
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  987.  @zer0homer  Isn't it the case that the only (or at least the main) group of Gulag prisoners that maintained a strong sense of personal dignity were the "Banderites" (ie Ukrainian nationalists)?
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  988. Given that Ukraine has started a trend of de-Russifying place names (Kiev -> Kyiv, Kharkov -> Kharkiv etc) maybe we should also now start spelling that country's name as "Qazaqstan"?
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  989. The modern Ukrainian city of Kherson is named after the ancient Greek colony of Chersonesos (although Chersonesos was roughly where Sevastopol now stands).
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  990. I thought the issue of secession from the United States was settled at Appomattox in 1865?
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  991.  @oldbloke135 Is that "Muscovites" as in "Muscovy" (as in you're calling them that to reject the Kremlin's claim to be the successor to Kyivan Rus), or do you mean only literal residents of the city of Moscow?
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  992.  @bixbysnyder-00  And there was no compelling reason for the US to be in Afghanistan any more once Bin Laden was killed.
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  993. Does Ukraine have any secret but unimportant info that they could divulge to Trump, that they could use to expose Trump as Putin's lackey if he passes it on?
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  994.  @kennymiddleton3463  When Trump supporters say "Make America Great Again" I believe a lot of them have the 1950s in mind: that decade was a great time to be an American working man, because Americans faced almost no foreign competition due to the rest of the world being reduced to rubble by World War II. I wonder if some of them want Russia to conquer Ukraine and then attack the rest of Europe (with the US and Canada conveniently withdrawn from NATO before hand) so that Europe can again be devastated by war and become a virtual captive market for American goods? Although they'd still have to do something about the real number one industrial power today, namely China...
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  995.  @murphy7801  When you're talking about "national debt" falling under New Labour you're talking about how much money the government owed. I'm looking at how much money the nation as a whole owed to foreigners, and the New Labour years saw an explosion in household debt, mostly secured against rising house prices and used to pay for foreign holidays and imported consumer goods.Much of this private debt became government debt due to the bank bailouts.
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  996. More like because Russia's nuclear arsenal forces the Western world to pull its punches.
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  997.  @murphy7801  France is a semi-presidential system, where executive power is shared between a (directly-elected) president and an (appointed by parliament) prime minister. Pure presidential democracy is rare outside the Americas: it is only dominant there because the US was the only real model existing for republican government when most Latin American countries became independent, and its inherent flaws were a significant contributor to Latin American political instability during the 20th century.
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  998. I remember learning how to pronounce some unfamiliar consonant clusters when teaching myself to sing "Zrodylys my velykoyi hodyny".
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  999.  @lorneyoung6298  The reason why Putin is able to use Middle Eastern refugees as a weapon against Europe is because Middle Eastern men have a reputation for being sexual harassers. AFAIK North Korean men don't have a similar reputation and therefore couldn't be weaponized in the same way.
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  1000. Did Chamberlain actually make the wrong call in 1938 though? I can think of at least 3 ways deciding to fight in 1938 could have backfired: 1) If Hitler managed to conquer France even without the help of the captured Czech tanks (after all, no-one expected him to do that easily even with them) then British morale would have been a lot shakier given that the UK would have gone to war on mere suspicion. 2) The Soviets could have just grabbed the Baltics and western Belarus and Ukraine (just as they did historically) while leaving Britain and France to twist in the wind against the Germans, or 3) The Soviets could have attacked Germany from the east leading to Germany's fall, but then carried on heading west and invaded France themselves (with the US still isolationist and the Soviets far stronger not having suffered a devastating German invasion themselves).
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  1001.  @Katoshi_Takagumi  German forces were dependent on horses for most of WWII: it made sense given how short of oil Germany was. The ultimate objective of Fall Blau (the 1942 German offensive that ended with the Battle of Stalingrad) was the oilfields of Azerbaijan.
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  1002.  @Katoshi_Takagumi  IG Farben was concerned about Peak Oil even back in the 1920s, and to that end developed the Fischer-Tropsch process to make oil from coal. Unfortunately for them it was rendered uneconomic by huge oil discoveries in Texas and Oklahoma, so they needed a government (ie the Nazis) that was committed to German self-sufficiency.
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  1003.  @Katoshi_Takagumi  Indeed they did, and it was later adopted by another pariah state (apartheid South Africa).
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  1004. I wonder if the mistake of the Western leaders is to imagine that Putin has a literal nuclear button that he can use to personally launch ICBMs?
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  1005.  @paddington1670  I doubt it as we're even more infested with NIMBYs than the US.
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  1006. My worry is that Putin (or more likely his successor) will realize that merely threatening nukes doesn't work and come to the conclusion that Russia needs to actually use them. Especially given that: a) Russia has never had much soft power, and with the conventional military also utterly trashed in Ukraine, the nukes are pretty much the only card left to play -- "if all you've got is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail", and b) Nuclear weapons need regular maintenance to remain functional over the long term, which they likely aren't getting in contemporary kleptocratic Russia -- "use 'em or lose 'em".
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  1007. I think MAGA types believed that America was "great" during the 1950s because all its industrial competitors had been wrecked by WWII. Thus they hope for Europe (and Asia, once China makes its move on Taiwan) to be wrecked by war again so that the US can have its captive markets back.
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  1008.  @itskyansaro  Actually no: the point of a higher octane rating is to allow the use of a higher compression ratio, which makes for a more efficient engine.
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  1009. Ukraine's current ammunition shortage is likely because no-one expected WWI-style trench warfare to return in the 21st century. In the first weeks of the war most observers expected Ukraine to be quickly conquered, while the eventual Russian defeat outside Kyiv was put down to Russian incompetence rather than a fundamental shift in military technology (eg the proliferation of drones) that favoured defenders.
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  1010. Immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa are especially difficult to integrate because that part of the world has a strong tradition of cousin marriage, resulting in society being splintered into powerful kin groups. Although the increased opportunities available in the West may help undermine that: in the 19th century Lebanese Christians were just as likely as Muslims to marry their cousins, but this declined in the 20th century due to the Westernizing influence of the Lebanese Christian diaspora in the Americas.
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  1011. Putin was Germany's dealer (of a drug called "methane"), not their friend.
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  1012. I think they want to return to the 1950s, when World War II had left the US with close to 50% of planetary GDP. Unfortunately they don't realize that the biggest industrial power today is not the US but China.
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  1013. Because Ukraine doesn't have similar natural resource cash cows to pay for mercenaries?
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  1014. Didn't the Jordanians also shoot down a fair number of those drones?
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  1015. Good example, given that Russia's attitude to treaties of any kind is much like the historical US attitude to treaties with the Native Americans.
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  1016. It's "if you tolerate this then your children will be next" actually, and those words were first used on a Republican propaganda poster during the Spanish Civil War.
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  1017.  @spambot_gpt7  What makes things worse is that Trump gave credence to the extreme left that they didn't deserve. Biden's victory marginalized them, and now (to regain their former salience) the extreme left is trying to use Palestine as a wedge issue to split the Democratic vote and put Trump back in the White House.
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  1018.  @nicholasconder4703  The Ottoman Sultans did have "Qaysar-i Rum" (Caesar of Rome) among their long list of titles.
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  1019. The map at 9:30 had me confused at first, because I'm not used to seeing Wahhabism in a different colour from mainstream Sunni Islam. Incidentally I like to call the Saudis the "Beverly Hillbillies of the dar al-Islam" because they're basically a bunch of desert barbarians who hit the oil jackpot.
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  1020. Perhaps the fact that the Crimean Tatars are a Turkic people (albeit Kipchak Turks, in contrast to the Oghuz Turks of Turkey) also influenced Erdogan's stance?
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  1021.  @brianvogt8125  Democrats Jeff Merkley (Oregon) and Peter Welch (Vermont) also voted against, as did Bernie Sanders (Vermont). I suspect those "no" votes were more likely anti-Israel than anti-Ukraine.
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  1022. Wasn't the important complacency far earlier, when the Western world allowed much of its war industry to atrophy? The United States in 1995 could manufacture 867,000 artillery shells a month (way more than would be needed to defeat Russia) while now it can only produce a paltry 30,000 a month.
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  1023.  @jamesgillen2339 Are Western leaders afraid that if they push back too hard against Russia, then Russia will drag the whole world down with them with their nuclear ICBMs?
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  1024.  @unconventionalideas5683 Reminds me of Trump, in that he too hoped to reverse Nixon's old geostrategy and ally with Russia against China.
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  1025. Germany got the jump on the Allies in the re-armament stakes because the Nazis were hell-bent on war from the moment they got into power in 1933, and engaged in massive deficit spending (even using the MEFO shell company to hide that spending from the outside world) in order to pay for it. Neville Chamberlain spent most of the early 1930s as Chancellor trying to fix the British economy to the point it would even support a re-armament drive, after it had been badly damaged by a misguided 1925 attempt to rejoin the gold standard at the pre-WWI rate.
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  1026. The biggest European country with a unicameral parliament is in fact Ukraine itself, while Portugal, the Scandinavian countries and the Baltic states also have unicameral parliaments.
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  1027.  @Go-ah-oold  Russia would never use all its nukes (substantially less than 20,000 IIRC) against Ukraine, because there'd be nothing left to deter the West from nuking Russia in revenge.
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  1028. I wonder what Russian opinion is regarding why Japan surrendered in 1945: was it the atomic bombs, or was it the Soviet entry into the war?
    1
  1029.  @Acacontrols  In the Russian language "русский" means ethnic Russian while "россиянин" means Russian citizen.
    1
  1030.  @GrahamCStrouse  The "Russian Federation" is still an empire, ruling over (amongst other non-Russian peoples) Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash, Kalmyks, Ingush, Chechens, Dagestanis, Tuvans and Buryats.
    1
  1031. That's probably a big reason why they took so long to arrive.
    1
  1032.  @philip5940  To me Russia's plan to cause a famine in the Middle East and North Africa (presumably to flood Europe with starving refugees) seems diabolical enough that it would be justification for Russia losing the Kuban at least. Соборна Українськая держава — Вільна й міцна, від Сяну по Кавказ!
    1
  1033. It's fitting that someone making an anti-capitalism comment on a video about the Ukraine war, should have the Makhnovite flag as their avatar.
    1
  1034. Babushka is the Russian word while babusya is the Ukrainian word. And even places like Kherson which until recently were primarily Russian-speaking likely won't be such for much longer...
    1
  1035. I thought that the main reason why people vote for Wilders is because they hate Islam and Muslims? The Hamas massacre in Israel last October 7 was likely a big factor in his success.
    1
  1036. Isn't German industry in particular in a state of collapse now that there is no more Russian gas to fuel it?
    1
  1037.  @SebastianHaban  The Republic of China only gained control of Taiwan after WWII, because Taiwan was already in Japanese hands (it had been taken in 1895) when the Republic of China was founded in 1912.
    1
  1038. Actually it's the March of Ukrainian Nationalists, a version of which was adopted officially by the Ukrainian military in 2017 and given the name "March of the New Army",
    1
  1039. Rural and exurban Americans believe environmentalists seek to destroy their way of life in the name of fighting climate change, and see the Russian petrostate as a natural ally. "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlement to a McHouse and a McCar." – James Howard Kunstler, 2005
    1
  1040. Hitler didn't need Soviet help to conquer Poland: what he needed the Soviets for was to supply his industry (for his subsequent war in the West) with resources that the Royal Navy couldn't cut off (because he was receiving them overland rather than by sea).
    1
  1041. Geert Wilders is one of the most virulently Islamophobic major politicians anywhere in Europe, so his strong performance in the recent Dutch election was likely driven more by the October 7 massacre in Israel than by Wilders's pro-Russia sympathies.
    1
  1042. The entire Trump cult was created by Russia's media stooges like Tucker Carlson: Trump himself had very little to do with it.
    1
  1043. Didn't Shevchenko arguably create the Ukrainian nation in its current form, as a shared admiration for his poetry united the Tsar's "Little Russian" subjects with the Galician and Carpathian Ruthenians under Vienna's rule?
    1
  1044.  @Alex.Kalashnik  Kremlin rulers of course claim(ed) to be the sole legitimate successors to Kyivan Rus: perhaps it is to dispute this that the Kremlin's subjects are referred to as "Moskali" by Ukrainians and Poles (and perhaps by Belarusians too?)
    1
  1045.  @Alex.Kalashnik  You have a good point in that a modern nation-state is typically defined by its language, and poetry (being inherently less translatable than prose) is often key to defining this language. Medieval kingdoms and empires didn't have a single language, but a continuum of local spoken dialects that were often mutually-unintelligible along with a written language typically set at a civilizational level (Latin for Western Christendom, Greek for the Byzantine Empire, Church Slavonic for the East Slavic world). What turned medieval states into modern nations was typically the introduction of the printing press (and later on mass education) and its use to impose a single common language. The Arab world though is still linguistically medieval to this day: almost no-one speaks the official Arabic language (fusHa) natively, rather it is to the dialects which Arabs actually speak, as Latin is to the Romance languages. Perhaps the Qur'an (which is in fusHa and is considered by Muslims to be the literal word of God) is one reason for this, but perhaps it is also precisely because the cursive-only Arabic script is a nightmare to print, such that even modern computers struggle with it?
    1
  1046. Svabodu Bielarusi! ⬜🟥⬜
    1
  1047. Do you think that the progressive side of Western politics will become less hostile to nationalism in general as a result of this war?
    1
  1048.  @olslobodyan  IIRC the OUN did collaborate with the Nazis (and with Weimar Germany before that) because they saw the Germans as potential allies against the Soviet and Polish occupiers of Ukraine. AIUI the OUN first started having misgivings about the Germans in 1939 (after they saw Germany throw Carpatho-Ukraine to the Hungarian wolves), and were well and truly stabbed in the back after they declared Ukrainian independence on 30 June 1941, and both Bandera and Melnyk ended up in Sachsenhausen concentration camp (although some of the Melnykites especially did continue to collaborate with the Nazis: probably why Melnyk is less popular than Bandera in contemporary Ukraine).
    1
  1049. Anyone want to compile a list of Western traitors supporting Russian imperialism? I'll start off with: 🇺🇸 Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇫🇷 Marine Le Pen 🇮🇹 Silvio Berlusconi 🇧🇪 Tinne van der Straeten 🇩🇪 Gerhard Schröder 🇭🇺 Viktor Orbán
    1
  1050. The famous 1929 song "March of Ukrainian Nationalists" (an edited version of which has been the Ukrainian Army's anthem since 2018) calls for a Ukraine "from the San to the Caucasus", including not just its currently internationally-recognized territories but also Rostov and the Kuban region of southern Russia, which was actually majority ethnic-Ukrainian prior to the Holodomor. If Russia's blockade of Ukrainian grain exports results in actual famine in Africa or the Middle East, do you think the West may end up supporting this historical Ukrainian territorial claim as a way to make sure such a starvation blockade can never be repeated?
    1
  1051. ​ @itsjustthemo Actually the Muscovite Tsars renamed their state "Rossiya" to appropriate the legacy of Kyivan Rus for themselves.
    1
  1052.  @Destroyer_V0  Neville Chamberlain was a fall guy. What really went wrong is that both Britain and France came out of World War I massively in debt to the US (much of which were denominated in US dollars), and couldn't extract enough reparations out of defeated Germany to pay these debts. As a result (and in contrast to America's "Roaring 20s") they both spent the 1920s mired in austerity and stagnation, crucified on a cross of gold. Britain only started to recover in 1931 after abandoning the gold standard, and Neville Chamberlain spent most of his next 5 years as Chancellor fixing up the British economy to the point that it could even support a rearmament programme in the first place. France was even worse off as it stuck to gold until 1936 (probably because it had lent vast sums to imperial Russia: debts which the Bolsheviks subsequently refused to honour) and that may well have contributed to its fall in 1940. Britain and France (plus France's "Little Entente" allies in central Europe) were too weak to stand up to Germany, while America selfishly cowered behind its oceanic moat and the USSR murdered its own people and nurtured its own imperialist ambitions against the Baltic States and Poland.
    1
  1053.  @Destroyer_V0  Churchill was wrong too though, because he placed his faith in deterrence rather than appeasement. Deterrence worked against cautious imperialists (like the Soviets for example), but it wouldn't work against a mad gambler like Hitler. Hitler was a nightmare in that neither appeasement nor deterrence would work on him: the nearest analogy today would be jihadist groups like al-Qaeda or Daesh, which fortunately have nothing like as much raw power as Hitler's Reich.
    1
  1054. Wrong, the actual female form of "Tsar" in Russian is "Tsaritsa", with "Tsarina" possibly used in the West due to German influence (as German uses -in to make female forms). And besides, Russian monarchs after 1721 styled themselves as Emperor/Empress (or Imperator/Imperatritsa in Russian).
    1
  1055. No, although F-16s can drop JDAM bombs (which is what the GLSDB was developed from).
    1
  1056. Surely the real problem is the millions of ordinary American voters who support Russia, as opposed to compromised politicians ?
    1
  1057. Reminds me of that photo of Winston Churchill with a Tommy gun, that made him look a bit like an American Prohibition-era gangster.
    1
  1058. I wonder if dependence on Sakhalin oil and gas is what drives a lot of those pro-Russian politicians in Japan? On the other hand I wonder how many Japanese (and even Westerners) are pissed enough at Russia that they'd like to see Sakhalin become Karafuto again?
    1
  1059. And St Petersburg is also Putin's home city!
    1
  1060. What we really need is an American "Revolution of Dignity" where they throw out their Putin-puppet president just as the Ukrainians did theirs 11 years ago.
    1
  1061.  @rumplstiltztinkerstein  And as a result lost 4 seats with heavily Muslim populations to pro-Palestinian independent candidates.
    1
  1062.  @JakeBroe  Should Russia be punished for its war with the loss of any of its own territories, just as Germany lost everything east of the Oder-Neisse Line after World War II?
    1
  1063.  @BinaryAbyssinia  Several of the pro-Russian regimes in Africa are tinpot dictatorships propped up by Wagner mercenaries. If direct Western involvement in the Ukraine war poses too much risk of nuclear war, might not bombing the Wagner forces in Africa (to weaken it both militarily and financially) be a safer alternative?
    1
  1064. That song has been my musical guilty pleasure for months now: I learned how to sing it even though I'd never studied any Slavic languages before (which meant I needed quite some practice at dealing with those unfamiliar consonant clusters!)
    1
  1065. Putin has funded climate change deniers in the West (because it's in his interest, given that he's the ruler of a petrostate): I guess though actual climate change isn't working to his advantage now though!
    1
  1066. ​@@ristokempasHow do Finns keep warm without burning fossil fuels? Do they do it the low-tech way (by burning wood from their abundant forests) or the high-tech way (electric heat pumps and/or nuclear-powered district heating)?​
    1
  1067. A ballistic missile is a missile with no wings, that free-falls onto its target after its rocket engine burns out. The first major example of such a missile was the Nazi V-2 rocket: contrast with the V-1 "flying bomb" which was a primitive cruise missile.
    1
  1068. Probably why the Ukrainian have taken to calling them "orcs".
    1
  1069. Isn't the likeliest explanation for Trump's treachery that he raped one or more underage girls at Jeffrey Epstein's private island, and Putin now has copies of the pictures? (Indeed there's a wide pattern in Russia's fifth columnists in the West: all the men seem to be sex pests -- convicted pedophile Scott Ritter being perhaps the most extreme example -- while all the women seem to be ex-strippers.) While Epstein himself probably wasn't working for Russia, perhaps the foreign power he was working for (most likely Saudi Arabia) had no use for an insolvent real estate mogul, and thus traded Trump off to Putin who felt he could use Trump to launder his money?
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  1070. The use of depositor's money to fund the military reminds me of the "silent financing" of the Nazi war machine during the earlier years of WWII. Germans were by then earning good money but they couldn't spend it due to rationing, so they put it in the bank, allowing the Nazis to "borrow" it for the duration. (Of course the Nazis also fooled middle-class Germans into saving 5 marks a week supposedly to buy them a Volkswagen, only the money was actually used to buy Kubelwagens for the army instead.)
    1
  1071.  @Old_Machine_Spirit  Although it was under Neville Chamberlain that the UK declared war on Nazi Germany the following year: he was trying to play Europe's two evil empires off against each other until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made it impossible.
    1
  1072. More like F-16 ——> F-35 The F-22 was more a replacement for the F-15 Eagle, and (AFAIK) is operated solely by the USAF.
    1
  1073. They even stole the name "Rus".
    1
  1074. I suspect a lot of the support for Russia in the global South is based on a bastardization of Karl Marx's famous call to arms: "Natural resource exporters of the world, unite!"
    1
  1075.  @Ocodo  And Schröder also began Germany's process of phasing out nuclear power, which increased their dependence on Russian gas. Traitorous bastard!
    1
  1076. That's interesting, as I thought that North Korea (and Cuba) only became poverty-stricken hellholes after 1991 because the USSR was no longer in existence to subsidize them any more.
    1
  1077. Except that Germany's denazification involved not only total defeat and occupation (which won't happen to Russia because of their thousands of nukes) but also having the Soviet menace towering over them for over 40 years. The lack of an equivalent threat is the reason why Radical Reconstruction failed in spite of the total defeat and occupation of the Confederacy in 1865.
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  1078.  @skipperclinton1087  Only a small minority of Republican politicians actively support Russia (or more accurately, are owned by Russia via kompromat). Most are just selfish and anxious (for the sake of their careers) to hang on to the MAGA voters brainwashed by Carlson and Hannity.
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  1079. I'm guessing the idea is to help the European far right, by flooding Europe with starving Middle Eastern refugees?
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  1080. Not useless. TRAITOROUS.
    1
  1081.  @richardarriaga6271  Even some English cities have had Hindu-vs-Muslim rioting recently.
    1
  1082. Slava natsiyi, smert' voroham!
    1
  1083. Although isn't the biggest reason for Labour's big win that voters disgusted at the Tories's failure to control immigration defected to Reform (aka Putin's British stooges) and split the right-wing vote?
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  1084. Isn't it illegal to cross the Russia-Belarus border overland unless you're a citizen of either of those countries, precisely because there's no passport control there?
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  1085. It was the Revolution of Dignity and the Russian response to it that changed everything: effectively Ukraine before 2014 was a successor to the Ukrainian SSR, while Ukraine after 2014 was more like a successor to the putative Ukrainian State declared in June 1941.
    1
  1086. I'd say Crimea was equivalent to Austria while the Donbas was equivalent to Sudetenland. It is the case though that almost all educated people in the Donbas are Ukrainian patriots, while the ones who turned traitor in 2014 were mostly less-educated people: pensioners, miners or (especially) cops. This class divide in national allegiance probably has its origins in the late 19th century, when the industrialists (some of them British!) who established coal mining there, recruited miners from Central Russia because the local Ukrainians refused to do such work.
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  1087. This is why Americans need to vote blue down-ballot, so that we won't have another Mike Johnson with his delaying tactics!
    1
  1088. Except that Kim only has a few nukes not thousands of them like Russia, and (AFAIK) he doesn't yet have a missile capable of hitting CONUS.
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  1089. I suspect these prisoners (like a lot of the forcibly conscripted "separatist" forces) will never be allowed to get close enough to Ukrainian soldiers to be able to surrender to them. Most likely they'll be used much like Stalin used his penal units during World War II: for clearing minefields, or as bait for Ukrainian artillery to shoot at, so that the Russians can discover their position and carry out counter-battery fire.
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  1090.  @richardharmon647 Wouldn't they be more likely to use lots of missiles to attack the bridge, so that even if the Russians shoot most of them down enough will get through to destroy it?
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  1091. There is an argument that Venezuela's current status as a failed state is partly Cuba's fault.
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  1092. Because while Russia's conventional military is shit, they still have an enormous nuclear arsenal.
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  1093. You mean Orbán surely? Maduro is the Venezuelan dictator.
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  1094. Isn't Utah probably the best-run red state with Texas second?
    1
  1095.  @ThomasBrooks07  Which would you say was the: 1. Best-run blue state? 2. Worst-run blue state? 3. Best-run red state? 4. Worst-run red state?
    1
  1096. Given the strength of Russian air defenses, perhaps Ukraine needs not F-16s but F-35s?
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  1097.  @jurgnobs1308  I'm guessing from the context that it was supposed to be 1990.
    1
  1098.  @allanritz5323  So sorry: my dad had a stroke in 2012 and has pretty much no short-term memory now.
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  1099.  @jounik  When Greece and Turkey joined NATO Cyprus was still a British colony, and the RAF even today has a base on the island at Akrotiri.
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  1100. Trump is a lying kompromized traitor.
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  1101. Indeed: "Black September" happened in 1970 because the PLO essentially tried to take over Jordan much as the Zionists took over Palestine 22 years earlier.
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  1102. Of course she may be in a part of Ukraine where most people of her age speak Russian as their first language.
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  1103.  @ekondigg6751  Stalin: "Socialism in one country" Hitler: "National socialism"
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  1104.  @scottsthaname1  Aren't some progressive Democrats blocking the bill too, in their case mostly because it also includes support for Israel?
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  1105.  @gianmarcobuzzotti4517  I wonder if it would be a good or a bad idea if Ukraine paid hitmen to kill Trump and other MAGA Republicans?
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  1106. He's against MUSLIM immigration specifically: in fact he's one of the most vehemently anti-Muslim politicians in Europe.
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  1107.  @michaelpayne9712  The 1991 war was about oil (specifically about preventing Saddam from monopolizing all of the Gulf oilfields by military force) while the 2003 war was more about the neocons' dream of making the Middle East safe for Israel.
    1
  1108. It's also because Western military forces have relied more on air power than artillery: unfortunately they can't bring that to bear easily in the current war because Western air forces dare not engage directly for fear of nuclear war, while it takes too much time to re-train Ukrainian crews on Western-built planes.
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  1109. To be fair Denmark took a similar lesson from their defeat by the Germans in 1864, which is why they didn't even try to resist the German invasion of 1940.
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  1110. Russia's economy is of course dominated by exporting oil and gas (and Russia has the coldest climate of the world's major powers), which would give them a natural interest in opposing climate action. I wonder how many rural and exurban Americans support Russia because they believe Russia would defend their fossil fuel heavy lifestyles (eg monster SUVs and pickup trucks) against attacks by environmentalists? Or as James Howard Kunstler put it back in 2005, "American will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlement to a McHouse and a McCar."
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  1111. I wonder if environmentalist groups who opposed fracking, nuclear energy, and even (on air pollution grounds) wood-burning stoves, will become hated by the general public and seen as traitors doing Russia's bidding?
    1
  1112. Moscow's Assets Grifting America
    1
  1113. I guess since Russia today (unlike WWI Germany or WWII Japan) is a resource-rich but technologically-backward country, the likely equivalent escalation would be close technological co-operation with China. Russia historically depended on Western technology (because they saw a divided West as a less politically risky technology supplier than monolithic totalitarian China) but won't this be about to change now that Russia has seen that the West can unite if provoked badly enough? This would suggest that the West now has a limited window of opportunity: the sanctions must totally cripple Russia's war effort before Russia can replace its Western technology suppliers with Chinese ones.
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  1114. Trump supporters believe America's real enemies are the asylum seekers flooding across the Mexican border.
    1
  1115. They probably would be doing that already were it not for Russia's huge nuclear arsenal.
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  1116. I'm not sure even actual Trump supporters trust anything Trump says: they just vote for him because they hate the people whom Trump vilifies.
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  1117.  @SueMyChin  How many launchers in a battery?
    1
  1118. When Vladlen Tatarsky was blown up with a booby-trapped gift, I wonder how many Ukrainians saw it as revenge for the 1938 assassination of Yevhen Konovalets, who was blown up by a bomb hidden in a box of chocolates?
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  1119. Although denazification did require that Germany be utterly defeated and occupied, which is unlikely to be practical in Russia's case because of nuclear weapons. And even total defeat and occupation isn't always enough: the American South was pretty thoroughly smashed in 1865, but still managed to defeat Radical Reconstruction.
    1
  1120. Because they fear Russia's nukes: that's all.
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  1121.  @cattymajiv  🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏
    1
  1122. Zelensky arguably combines the roles of Chamberlain and Churchill, given that was elected on a peace platform.
    1
  1123. Alexander the Great conquered the Middle East though, not Europe.
    1
  1124. The difference is that a prime minister is the head of the biggest party in the legislature, while a president is separately elected (either directly or via an electoral college with no other function). And in addition to purely presidential systems (like the US and most other countries in the Americas) and purely parliamentary systems (like the UK) there are also semi-presidential systems like France where a president and prime minister share power.
    1
  1125.  @MrBlaxjax  No, the fact that the Irish presidency (like the British monarchy) is essentially a purely ceremonial position demonstrates that Ireland is a parliamentary system.
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  1126. I suspect that's why there's so much sympathy for Russia in African countries, as they tend to be either commodity exporters (and thus coining it in from the high commodity prices caused by Russia's war) or extremely poor (and thus desperate to get their hands on some discounted Russian oil or stolen Ukrainian grain).
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  1127.  @MAGAman-uy7wh  My point was that the territories that the USSR took from Poland in 1939 weren't returned to Poland (except for Bialystok) but nor are they part of Russia today: instead they are parts of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. The eastern part of interwar Poland was subject to attacks by Ukrainian terrorists, and much of the Ukrainian population there celebrated Poland's defeat in 1939 even though they weren't supportive of Russians or Communism either.
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  1128.  @stargazer-elite  Agree that the immigration crisis isn't Biden's fault, but isn't the inflation at least the product of excessive stimulus during the early part of Biden's administration, which is when Covid was at its worst?
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  1129. They believe their lifestyle choices (huge exurban house and huge SUV or pickup truck) are threatened by environmentalists, and see the Russian petrostate as a natural ally against those environmentalists.
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  1130.  @harryhewitt6795  The French didn't deindustrialize Germany at Versailles: what they did do was impose ruinous reparations on Germany -- largely because France had bankrolled imperial Russia's war effort, and lost the money when the Bolsheviks took over and defaulted on this debt. France still couldn't screw enough money out of Germany to recover properly: as a result it spend most of the interwar period mired in austerity (it stayed on the gold standard until 1936, while the UK dumped it in 1931 and the US in 1933), contributing to its easy defeat in 1940.
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  1131. Were those Cubans already in Russia beforehand? I don't expect Russians are actually seizing Cubans from Cuba itself.
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  1132. In neither case it is actually their money though. Trump went bankrupt and was bailed out by Putin to serve as a money-launderer, while JD Vance is Peter Thiel's puppet.
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  1133.  @adamvenus6382  Wouldn't it be a fifth partition, with the fourth being the Nazi-Soviet one of 1939?
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  1134. The problem with that is that Russia has a huge nuclear arsenal.
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  1135. Unfortunately no-one is currently suggesting that Ukraine be supplied with stealth aircraft, and older Western types would be easy meat for Russian air defense, just as Russia's air force is easy meat for Ukrainian air defense.
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  1136. I suspect the National Republican Army is a fake group: the Russian state has form going back as far as Tsarist times for creating such groups as a means of flushing out opposition.
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  1137. Does anyone else think that Russia's invasion of Ukraine last February helped kill off that minority sentiment in the west that greatly admired China (mostly in a sense that "no-one can fight Covid as well as the Chinese")?
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  1138. Interestingly that song (originally the anthem of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) defines Ukraine as being "from the San to the Caucasus": it makes me wonder whether Russia ought to lose part of its own territories as a result of this war? After all, Germany lost everything east of the Oder-Neisse line because of Hitler, and Russia's attempt to cause a famine in the Middle East with a Black Sea blockade is arguably an imperative to cut them out of said sea.
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  1139. The world didn't realize how drone proliferation had shifted the balance of war back in the defender's favor. Russia didn't realize that (which is why they thought they'd take Kyiv in 3 days), and the West didn't realize it (which is why they put Russia's failure at Kyiv down to incompetence: although admittedly they way the Ukrainians outwitted them at Kharkiv later in the year may have contributed to that perception). It was only the miserable failure of the summer 2023 Ukrainian offensive that made it clear.
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  1140.  @johnvannisselroy6197  Israel looks like a major power next to the occupied Palestinians, but next to the entire Arab (or Muslim) world not so much.
    1
  1141.  @junkequation  It's not just fundamentalists like Hamas who have the goal of destroying Israel, but pretty much every politically active Palestinian: as far as they're concerned their country was stolen from their by European Jewish colonists with the help of the then British Empire.
    1
  1142. Finland had a civil war at the same time as Russia's: the main difference is that in Finland the Whites won.
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  1143.  @questionmaker5666  My theory on why so many Africans support Russia is that they bastardized Karl Marx's famous call to arms into "natural resource exporters of the world, unite!"
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  1144. Fortunately the UK (unlike the US) doesn't seem to have any of its main parties run by Russia sympathisers.
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  1145. Where do you live (country and nearest big city)?
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  1146. What effect do you think the current war will have on Ukrainian veneration for Bandera and other OUN and UPA figures? Will it be strengthened because Ukrainians will see them as having being vindicated in their beliefs that Russia is an incorrigibly imperialist state? Or will it be weakened because a democratic Ukraine with lots of its own heroes will see no further reason to lionize defeated fascist revolutionaries?
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  1147.  @ldkbudda4176  The reason why Bandera ended up in Sachsenhausen (and his two brothers in Auschwitz) wasn't because the Nazis disagreed with his ideology, but rather because they planned to exterminate the Ukrainians (like all the other eastern Slavs) to clear their land for German colonists. The OUN called their ideology "integral nationalism" but it was very similar to what was called fascism in other countries. Although the OUN and UPA did become less fascistic as the war progressed, largely because they increasingly encountered eastern Ukrainians whose suffering under Bolshevik rule had embittered them against totalitarianism of any kind.
    1
  1148.  @onemustlivefree  I suppose the Speaker of the House is the nearest thing to a Prime Minister that the US has.
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  1149.  @chriswinstanley6824 The Sudetenland also had a majority-German population: it was effectively Czechoslovakia's "Crimea" in that respect.
    1
  1150.  @macmcleod1188  Perhaps they see Russia (as the world's most powerful petrostate) as a champion of the fossil-fuelled way of life that the environmentalists are determined to destroy?
    1
  1151. It's harder for countries to get over losing a territorially-contiguous empire than to get over losing overseas colonies. Note the Hungarian irredentist sentiment that Orbán has been able to exploit!
    1
  1152.  @getyoursupervisor8519  Sometimes I wonder if Chernobyl wasn't actually an accident, but rather a Hail Mary attempt to save the USSR by terrifying Western Europe into abandoning nuclear energy and replacing it with Russian gas.
    1
  1153.  @ArmySigs  Actually I think @palasta was sarcastically criticizing the US's Middle East policy.
    1
  1154.  @BabyBird691  And the longer-term priority in this Cold War II for Western countries must be to reduce their imports of consumer goods from China.
    1
  1155. Videos of him raping kids on Jeffrey Epstein's island? Or something involving a murder?
    1
  1156. NATO wouldn't dare invade the Kola Peninsula (where Murmansk is) because (IIRC) a good chunk of Russia's ICBMs are located there (much as America's own Minuteman ICBMs are located mostly in the northern Great Plains).
    1
  1157.  @steve470  Why aren't any other Republicans willing to run against her in the primary?
    1
  1158.  @steve470  Why exactly do you think MTG is so popular? It certainly doesn't sound like a top-down phenomenon driven by Kremlin money or kompromat!
    1
  1159.  @cerebralmaster  Putin wouldn't go in for anything so petty: he prefers the kind of kompromat that (if it came out) would send someone to prison for life.
    1
  1160.  @cerebralmaster  My guess is photos from Epstein's island.
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  1161. Aren't the Russian accusations of Nazism directed at post-Maidan Ukraine based on its embrace of symbolism originating with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Ukrainian Insurgent Army (one example of which is the "Slava Ukraini! Heroyam Slava!" call-and-response)?
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  1162. There's a unit "Rota Bashkort" in the Ukrainian army, hoping to ultimately create a free Bashkortostan.
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  1163. Although they're mainly in tomatoes and other salad vegetables, and the result of Brexit along with a cold snap in Spain and North Africa.
    1
  1164.  @izabelasiczek3547  I expect that pro-Russian Poles would demonize the Ukrainians as "Banderites", especially given the adoption of OUN symbolism by post-Maidan Ukraine. Examples would be the army adopting a variant of "March of Ukrainian Nationalists" as its anthem, or the now-familiar "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!" call and-response greeting. But my impression was that only a tiny minority of Poles supported Russia.
    1
  1165. I nuked my X account the day I heard Trump won, and my (admittedly little-used) Facebook account followed suit at the weekend because I don't trust Mark Zuckerberg either!
    1
  1166. I'm happy I understood the reference! Of course that incident was in large part a result of the multilingual nature of the Austrian Empire...
    1
  1167. No, what happened that they never learned how to make their own smart machine tools (and thus became reliant on ones imported from Germany and other Western countries) but also failed to maintain a workforce capable of using the Soviet-era dumb machine tools.
    1
  1168. The reason why a lot of global-South countries aren't enthusiastic about a Ukrainian victory is because many of them are either: 1) Commodity exporters, happy for the high prices resulting from Russia's war, or 2) Desperately poor, and thus happy for the opportunity to buy some discounted Russian oil or stolen Ukrainian grain.
    1
  1169.  @nevco8774  I was thinking of South Africa as a commodity exporter: as you mention there's the uranium, diamonds and gold, along with (IIRC) a bunch of other minerals where it's the main non-Russian source.
    1
  1170. Aren't Ukrainians using the Nazi title "Gauleiter" to refer to Russian-controlled regional governors, such that Kadyrov could be referred to as the Gauleiter of Chechnya?
    1
  1171. Which would make it more like Nazi Germany's "Hunger Plan".
    1
  1172. And that act of aggression is likely a big part of why Saddam Hussein was seen as fair game in 2003.
    1
  1173. No, free Ichkeria, Dagestan, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Tuva, Buryatia etc.
    1
  1174. Why would Trump admire a loser like Hitler?
    1
  1175. Which country do you live in?
    1
  1176.  @moritamikamikara3879  Presumably the people of Kyiv would have identified as "Russki" back in the days of Kyivan Rus: at what point in history did they begin identifying as "Ukraïnski"?
    1
  1177. During WWI the Ottoman sultan called for a jihad against the Allies, but wasn't taken seriously by the world's Muslims because he had chosen to join the war in alliance with a non-Muslim aggressor nation (Germany). And if an actual recognized Caliph of Islam couldn't get his call of jihad taken seriously in these circumstances, then a petty vassal of the actual non-Muslim aggressor nation ("Putin's Gauleiter" as Michael MacKay puts it) would have even less credibility. Muslims normally only recognize as jihad a war where Muslims defend themselves (without non-Muslim fighting allies) against aggression by a non-Muslim power: modern examples would be the Afghan war against the Soviets or (more controversially) the Palestinian resistance to Zionist colonization.
    1
  1178. When it comes to their propaganda in the global South, it's also "natural resource exporters of the world, unite!"
    1
  1179. Not so much scared of the Russians themselves as of their MAGA lapdogs.
    1
  1180. The biggest factor in Lukashenko staying in power so long was that he was the only leader of a post-Soviet leader able to keep the Soviet-era welfare state functioning. However the only reason he could do that was because Russia was selling Belarus vast quantities of oil and gas for a nominal price, far beyond what Belarus itself needed -- most carried on through the pipelines to the EU, where it was sold at full market value with the Belarusian state receiving the profit. In effect Belarus after the Cold War was like Cuba during the Cold War: a state that made its living in the world by serving as the Kremlin's (massively subsidized) propaganda showpiece. It is no wonder that Cuba fell into the most wretched poverty in the 1990s once the USSR collapsed and the subsidies dried up. Perhaps Lukashenko has realized that sanctions-hit Russia will no longer be able to continue subsidizing his regime, and is now frantically looking for a way out?
    1
  1181. Has Jake ever touched on the fact that most of continental Europe is now having unusually mild winter conditions? This should hopefully mean that Russia's gas blackmail is DOA...
    1
  1182. ​ @jensholm5759  Yes, thanks to the warmongering bastards in the Kremlin.
    1
  1183. Actually "Hey Hey Rise Up" is the Pink Floyd version of the original Ukrainian song, which is called "Ой у лузі червона калина" and was originally written for the Sich Riflemen, a Ukrainian regiment in the Austro-Hungarian army of World War I.
    1
  1184. Also because Dagestan is stupidly diverse to the point that I imagine they'd keep the Russian language around even if they became independent, as no indigenous language of theirs could dominate. (Sort of like why a lot of African countries kept their colonizers' languages around...)
    1
  1185. I wonder if some of those pro-Putin Polish farmers hate Ukraine because they lost relatives in the Volhynia massacres during World War II, and because post-Maidan Ukraine adopted some of the symbolism of OUN-UPA (eg the whole "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes" thing)?
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  1186. There's a reason why Jake routinely calls her "Marjorie Traitor Greene" 😉
    1
  1187. Although aren't variants of the SS marching song the Teufelslied (but in the local languages) still popular in the Baltic states? So arguably the accusation of Nazism has more force (still not very much though) when applied to them, than it does when applied to Ukraine?
    1
  1188.  @mal2ksc  Just as France needed separate Atlantic and Mediterranean fleets (due to British control of Gibraltar) and the pre-Panama Canal USA needed separate Atlantic and Pacific Fleets, so Russia's geography means they need four separate fleets: a Northern Fleet in the Arctic, a Baltic Fleet, a Black Sea fleet and a Pacific fleet in Vladivostok.
    1
  1189. Perhaps the problem is that the vaunted "Arsenal of Democracy" no longer exists? Do European countries even have the industry to physically produce ammunition in the quantities that Ukraine needs?
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  1190. The issue is that any direct combat between NATO and Russia would risk a calamitous escalation to DEFCON 1, which nobody sane wants. Even if Russia's ICBMs are garbage and the US is able to deal quickly with the rest of Russia's nuclear forces, you'd still be looking at millions of dead civilians in NATO countries, along with the utter destruction of the Russian people.
    1
  1191.  @Muljinn Tulsi Gabbard probably is too.
    1
  1192.  @AstroGremlinAmerican  Australia also has no land borders, or even (unlike the UK) sufficient proximity to a neighbouring landmass to make crossings by makeshift boats feasible. This (along with having no truck-borne RoRo international trade, due to their remoteness) is why they and New Zealand were able to pursue a Zero Covid policy in 2020.
    1
  1193.  @KungKras  Cartels that are only as strong as they are because so many Americans want to buy drugs.
    1
  1194. I wonder if some of them were in some related to the Poles murdered by the UPA in Volhynia during World War II?
    1
  1195.  @francoisbourriaud9646  Would your Prime Minister be roughly like a US Speaker of the House?
    1
  1196. I suspect the Hamas attacks on Israel last October 7 will have massively boosted the far right by fuelling fear of Muslim immigration in particular.
    1
  1197. Germany isn't just refusing to send their own Leopard tanks to Ukraine, they're refusing to allow other operators of the Leopard (by far the most popular tank in Europe) to send theirs. And the reason is that Germany really wants to start using Russian gas again once the war is over (because their economic model depended on it: US LNG may be stopping Germans from freezing in the dark, but it's too expensive to allow a lot of Germany's chemical industry to remain internationally competitive) while the more hawkish European countries want to permanently sever their economic ties with Russia (or at least cut them to the unavoidable bare minimum) regardless of the war's outcome.
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  1198. They're fighting as if they still had the demographic profile they had during WWI or WWII!
    1
  1199. Isn't the UK's dependence on foreign money largely a result of the chronic trade deficit it has run for most of the past half-century, caused in part by its botched entry to the EEC in 1973?
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  1200. Nigel Farage has been a party leader for most of the time since 2006, first of the UK Independence Party, then the Brexit Party and now Reform UK.
    1
  1201. It's on Salisbury Plain, which also hosts one of the UK's main military training grounds.
    1
  1202. I suspect a lot of people now look at the Russian flag the same way that they'd look at Daesh's piratical black and white banner!
    1
  1203. "BRICS" is a Goldman Sachs buzzword which Russia and China are using (unsuccessfully) to try to bully Brazil and India into being their lackeys.
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  1204. Two other explanations I could think of: 1) They see Putin as a anti-green champion of the fossil fuel economy, or 2) They want the war in Ukraine to grow and engulf Europe and Asia, so that the world can be America's captive market again just like in the glory days of the 1950s.
    1
  1205. Does Fico have any record of sexual harassment? That's something that a lot of Russia's fifth columnists in the West have in common (it's down to the way in which the KGB/FSB recruited agents).
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  1206. Why isn't Germany doing anything about its own traitors: like Gerhard Schröder for example?
    1
  1207. Any possibility that Putin's firing of Shoigu was in part a sop to the Chinese, given that Shoigu comes from Tuva, a territory that used to be part of China under the Qing dynasty?
    1
  1208.  @jeffreyhanc1711  I think for many MAGA supporters the real enemies are environmentalists (who want to make them "live in a pod", "eat bugs" and "own nothing and be happy") and they see Putin's petrostate as a natural ally against them.
    1
  1209. Didn't Putin first adopt his signature long table in 2020, due to his paranoia about Covid?
    1
  1210. I thought fear of Russia going nuclear is based on the notion that they'll believe that defeat in Ukraine will lead to the end of Russia anyway, so the best they can do is drag the rest of the world down with them with their nukes.
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  1211. Although at least in fairness to Haig he was generalling at a time when nobody had yet had experience of continuous-front war.
    1
  1212. Actually they're a Uralic people, other European examples of which are the Finns and Estonians.
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  1213. Surely any computers used to store top secret documents wouldn't be connected to the internet? AIUI the critical security breach was that Mr Teixeira was allowed to take a smartphone somewhere where such documents were stored (in paper form), which he used to photograph them. And I'm guessing with your mention of "Official Secrets Act" (sp) that you're British?
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  1214. I guess this war is the one case where global warming (and/or the fossil fuel combustion that drives it) isn't good for Russia?
    1
  1215. There's a video on here of the Azov Battalion in 2015 reciting the "Prayer of a Ukrainian Nationalist", where the soldier leading the "prayer" had a Union Jack on his uniform just above the Azov insignia!
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  1216.  @JakeBroe  A cryptography expert I read on Twitter suggested it died in 2014 when the FSB hacked into the Fox News email server (the Republican counterpart of their DNC hack two years later). That's how Putin made his stooge Tucker Carlson into a leading anchor of the channel, and also won Trump the nomination in 2016 by providing him with inside info on his rivals.
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  1217. ​ @Kingcarparpeggio ​I'm guessing he wants full global redistribution of wealth, which would make the economic ranking the same as the population ranking. India #1, China #2, US #3, Indonesia #4, Pakistan #5, Nigeria #6, Brazil #7, Bangladesh #8, Russia #9, Ethiopia #10.
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  1218.  @maxgraham479  The only 20th-century western European country that desperately clung to its overseas empire was Portugal, which (not so coincidentally) was under a fascist regime at the time.
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  1219.  @davidhawkins7138  Although I don't think Armenia now is in any sense still part of a Russian sphere of influence.
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  1220.  @davidhawkins7138  I thought Azerbaijan was more Western-aligned these days in spite of its authoritarian regime?
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  1221. Wasn't the so-called "Glorious Revolution" really a Dutch invasion (albeit with a fair amount of English collaboration)?
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  1222. Even if the Russian people turn against the war I don't see how that will necessarily end it, as there isn't a split in the Russian ruling elite that a popular uprising could exploit. Both Ukrainian revolutions (2004 and 2013) involved a popular uprising in favour of the pro-Western faction of the elite against the pro-Russian faction. Incidentally, may this endanger Ukrainian democracy in the longer term, now that the pro-Russian faction in Ukraine has been utterly discredited and destroyed by Putin's war?
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  1223. Didn't the Germans use horse carts for logistics mainly because they didn't have enough oil to fuel a fully-motorized army? That's what the advance towards Stalingrad was all about: guarding the flanks of the main army group that was headed for the oil fields of Azerbaijan.
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  1224. Tanks (of either side) aren't much use during the mud season, so I guess we'll see more tank action in a couple of weeks when the ground freezes.
    1
  1225. I heard a new hypothesis recently as to why the western reaction to Russia's 2014 theft of Crimea was so muted -- apparently the western forces in Afghanistan at the time were largely being supplied by trains that passed through Russian territory, and which ultimately entered Afghanistan from Uzbekistan. It almost makes me wonder if Afghanistan was surrendered to the Taliban precisely because western leaders had an inkling that Russia was planning something big, and wanted to eliminate the threat of Russia using the western troops in Afghanistan as hostages?
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  1226.  @krakken-  Or perhaps some non-critical secrets that (if they are leaked to Putin) would prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Trump is a fifth columnist.
    1
  1227. Because enough Americans believe everything they see on Fox News, and the Russians hacked Fox News in 2014?
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  1228.  @TheNefastor  Ukraine is nowhere near Kursk: do you mean Ukraine should keep Sudzha ?
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  1229.  @midimusicforever  It's worked sometimes (as for Turkey in the 1920s or Finland in the 1940s). It wouldn't work for Ukraine though because Russia's problem is with the existence of the Ukrainian nation not with its territorial extent. It also wouldn't work for Israel for the same reason.
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  1230. More corrupt: the puppet states they set up in the Donbas are increasingly becoming the prototype for Russia itself.
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  1231.  @ShawNshawN  The problem in all cases is the 1967 New York Protocol Relating To the Status of Refugees.
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  1232. The Russian people are just too screwed up by centuries of monstrous Mongol, Tsarist and Bolshevik rule.
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  1233. I'm also in the UK, and the second song in a language I don't speak which I learned how to sing was the March of Ukrainian Nationalists.
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  1234. May the first winter offensive be in Luhansk, given that my (superficial) understanding of Ukraine's climate suggests that'll be the first part of the front to see frozen ground?
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  1235. I prefer "Moscow Agents Grifting America".
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  1236. ​ @carolwilliams8511 The "March of Ukrainian Nationalists" has been my musical guilty pleasure for about that long.
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  1237. If Lukashenko is Russia's puppet dictator in Belarus, isn't Maduro arguably Cuba's puppet dictator in Venezuela?
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  1238. 1. Crimea was the one part of Ukraine where the population was majority ethnic-Russian. 2. In 2014 the Western powers were reliant on trains passing through Russia to supply their armies in Afghanistan: it me wonder if the West abandoned Afghanistan to the Taliban because they saw the far more serious threat brewing in Eastern Europe?
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  1239.  @MLN-yz4ph  I remember when Israel was accused of using depleted uranium ammo in Gaza, and my thought was "wot? When did Hamas acquire tanks?"
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  1240. Is it not more likely that China would lean on a weakened Russia to let them establish bases for the PLAN in the Kuril Islands, thus circumventing the "first island chain" (Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines) that currently keeps the PLAN bottled-up? Actually invading outer Manchuria, likely wouldn't help, as I expect that if Vladivostok ever did fall to the Chinese, the US President would then call Japan and basically say "Karafuto and Chishima*? They're all yours for the taking!" * Japanese for "Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands"
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  1241. To me they looked like SIM cards.
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  1242.  @jimbøb-i9q  Actually Trump supporters tend to be above average in income: my thought is that they're anti-environmentalists who see Putin (boss of the world's most powerful petrostate) as their champion.
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  1243.  @yyyy-uv3po  Gerhard Schröder should be on trial for treason.
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  1244. ​ @darthwiizius  Another way you could think of this current war as being Cold War II's version of the Korean War. In Cold War I the USSR was clearly the strongest enemy of the West with China as a secondary enemy, while in Cold War II it is clear that China will be by far the most formidable adversary of the West, backed up by a few nuclear-blackmail (or wannabe nuclear-blackmail) gangster regimes: North Korea, Pakistan, Iran and now Russia. The wars in Korea and Ukraine both began basically as quasi-civil wars (North Korea vs South Korea, or pro-Russian Donbas separatists vs Ukraine) and then widened as the world's second strongest anti-Western power joined the action directly. North Korea's army was essentially defeated before the end of 1950, with the rest of the Korean War being fought almost entirely against the Chinese.
    1
  1245.  @darthwiizius  Windscale was an air-cooled nuclear reactor used for producing plutonium for nuclear weapons, and had nothing to do with civilian nuclear power. The Magnox reactors (graphite moderated and CO2 cooled) were used for both electricity and bomb-making.
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  1246. Georgia too has a fifth of its territory under Russian occupation.
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  1247. ​ @JakeBroe  While do you think Russia will break up, as opposed to maybe losing Chechnya and Dagestan but otherwise remaining intact?
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  1248.  @carolwilliams8511  I suspect Trump is kompromized, most likely involving Epstein's island.
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  1249.  @AstroGremlinAmerican  Which is why I regard Herr Atomausstieg Gerhard Schröder as one of modern Europe's worst traitors.
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  1250. Probably mostly Chinese men, given how China's sex ratio was skewed by the one-child policy + the cultural preference for sons.
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  1251. How likely is it that Russia will use nuclear weapons against the Syrian rebels, believing (especially given Gaza) that the West simply doesn't care about Arab lives to the extent that they care about NATO or even Ukrainian lives?
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  1252. Isn't the usual cause of hyperinflation when a government has vast debts denominated in foreign currency and tries to print their way out of it?
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  1253.  @MKD-fe5vf  My point was describe how Russia sees itself, not to justify their actions. It is notable that Western civilization hasn't had a real civilization-state since at the latest when Charlemagne's kingdom was divided (and more likely since the fall of the Western Roman Empire), while its adversaries tend to be either existing civilization-states (Russia, China) or people who aim to resurrect a fallen civilization-state (jihadists who seek to restore the Caliphate).
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  1254. Putin's favourite method of subverting European democracies was to get his kompromized assets to give large monetary donations to minor political parties, which would likely result in those assets becoming very powerful within those parties. That approach doesn't work in the US with its strict two-party system, so there he resorted instead to hacking into the Fox News email server.
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  1255. I couldn't see China or anyone else invading actual Russian territory, because while Russia's conventional military is rubbish, they still have a huge nuclear arsenal.
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  1256. Russia is a wannabe superpower, not a real superpower like the US or China.
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  1257. Not really the same thing, as the vast majority of Turks were then illiterate, so there wasn't as much to lose by adopting a new script. And part of the reason why may have been that the old Arabic script (in which most vowels are omitted) was ill-suited to the Turkish language. An often-quoted example was that "Mehmet paşa oldu" (“Muhammad became a pasha”) and Mehmed Paşa öldü ("Muhammad Pasha died") were written identically in the old script.
    1
  1258. The main reason why the greater Middle East is so screwed up isn't so much the religion as the prevalence of cousin marriage, which hinders nation-building by splintering society into kin groups.
    1
  1259. I saw a Muslim who commented on that Hamas video at 16:05, who pointed out that the Hamas speaker was actually talking about the end times -- Muslims believe in the second coming of Jesus much as Christians do, but they believe he'll convert the whole world to Islam. Don't know whether it'd be a good thing that they're not thinking of conquering the world in this-worldly terms, or whether it's a bad thing that they seem to have this kind of eschatological focus?
    1
  1260. It's especially crazy given that the victorious Labour Party actually had four of their MPs defeated by independent Muslim candidates running on a pro-Palestine ticket.
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  1261.  @raven4k998  More likely Scholz is desperate to get the Russian gas flowing again once the war is over (however it ends) because he believes the future of the German industrial economy depends on it. American gas is far more expensive (in Germany) than Russian gas because it has to be liquified and shipped across the Atlantic while Russian gas is sent via pipeline, so while it's enough to keep German homes warm and lit up, it isn't enough to allow Germany's heavy industries to function in a way that would allow them to remain competitive with American or Chinese industries.
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  1262. Good thing that Russia still likes to larp as Christian, as otherwise they might have reintroduced polygamy!
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  1263.  @zetaanarchics7113  Unfortunately electric cars are either far more expensive or made in China.
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  1264.  @fishcane1  As America becomes more secular the abortion issue is becoming less and less important: it has now largely been replaced (as an animating issue of the right) by anti-immigration.
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  1265.  @badgerpa9 The issue is more that most Western countries have now run down their stockpiles and don't have much capacity to make more weapons and ammo, as so many of the factories were closed down to save money during the 1990s.
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  1266. Or "Axis of Tyranny".
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  1267.  @scipioafricanus5871  Maybe that's why the piece representing the Russian Far East is labelled with a К (for Китай -- China)?
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  1268.  @nian60  I could live with that provided Japan gets Chishima and Karafuto back.
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  1269. Another reason why China became so dominant in manufacturing was because they hit the demographic jackpot: in the 1990s the last products of Mao's pro-natalist policies were swelling the workforce while dependent children were far fewer in number due to the post-Mao One Child policy. West Germany's Wirtschaftswunder in the late '50s and early '60s had a similar basis, as it was when the vast numbers of children which the Nazis had encouraged to be born, were finally coming of age.
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  1270. Which alternative options would you suggest for EVs, especially for people who also wish to avoid Chinese brands?
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  1271. I'd say that (at least if we stick to recognized sovereign states) it was a close tie between them and Saudi Arabia.
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  1272.  @olg7483  Not really, as the modern Ukrainian identity draws from lots of more recent influences, such as the Kozaks for example.
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  1273.  @rejeanlevesque8881  That may get a lot more difficult now that Assad has fallen.
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  1274. It helps that American conservatives are addicted to Fox News, so Putin knew exactly where his hackers had to target in order to suborn them.
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  1275. I'd think it was that ICBMs are so fast that they're almost impossible to shoot down, and are quicker to launch (and more accurate) than submarine-based ballistic missiles.
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  1276.  @bungalowjuice7225  The missiles themselves are indeed very similar: the disadvantage in accuracy is because the location of a submarine isn't known as precisely as that of a fixed silo, while the disadvantage in speed of launch is due to the difficulty in communicating with a submerged submarine. SLBMs are ideal second-strike weapons but very poor first-strike weapons: this may be why the UK (whose small geographic area and dense population mean it would stand no chance in a nuclear war) chose a purely submarine-based nuclear deterrent.
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  1277. Fear that Putin will throw a nuclear temper tantrum would seem the most obvious reason.
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  1278.  @tctopcat1981  AIUI Harris's biggest failure was with Latino voters, many of which had been exposed to lots of right-wing propaganda in Spanish.
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  1279. Of course they'd need Turkish permission to pass through the Bosphorus.
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  1280. Surely the only thing that would really endanger Putin's position is if he were forced to expend his internal security (Rosgvardia) troops in Ukraine?
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  1281. I wonder how many Russian women end up as mail order brides in China, given that they have the opposite problem of too many men (because of the one-child policy and sex-selective abortion)?
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  1282.  @switchhit3774  Also Putin needed time to fortify their economy against the sanctions he knew would come.
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  1283. Still not sure that he remembers yet that "zh" should be pronounced like the "g" in "massage".
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  1284. Gazprom (as its name implies) is for natural gas not oil, but it too will have lost a load of revenue when the Nordstream pipelines were blown up.
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  1285.  @bobkellough6144  No: China invaded Vietnam in 1979 (and got their asses kicked).
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  1286.  @TantorNa  Which is probably what explains the delays, as Ukraine is trying to destroy as much of that air defense system as possible before the F-16s go into action.
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  1287. Perhaps they believe Putin (as the leader of a country whose economy depends on oil and gas exports) will protect their way of life (big exurban houses, monster SUVs) against the environmentalists?
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  1288. Plus authoritarian petrostates normally tend to subsidize domestic fuel sales as a means of buying the loyalty of their populace.
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  1289. Why hasn't Gerhard Schröder gone on trial for treason yet?
    1
  1290. I wonder if any Ukrainians are willing to let Russia keep Crimea simply because they think its demographics (ethnic Russians were a comfortable majority even pre-2014) would make it more trouble than it's worth to reintegrate? (Unless they expect that by the time the war ends, the West will have been so enraged by the Russian atrocities that they'd greenlight the mass explusion of ethnic Russians from Crimea, much like the expulsion of Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after World War II...)
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  1291.  @jonlee2217 And it makes sense that a mercenary outfit named after one of 19th-century Germany's most notorious antisemites, would train terrorists to kill Jews.
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  1292.  @bearpaw72  There was also the Ukrainian Insurgent Army: a resistance group set up by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (they're the guys that gave us the slogans "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!" that our host here concludes with) that fought against both the Nazis the USSR, and which were only finally defeated in the mid-1950s.
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  1293.  @Whatshisname346  Although Finland was still forced to give up part of its territory to the Soviet Union in that war, even if it preserved its independence.
    1
  1294. Jake seems to have overlooked that the current US border crisis (like the UK small boats crisis) is about asylum seekers rather than the more traditional kind of illegal immigration.
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  1295. Russia has close to the oldest leadership of all the former Soviet republics, and Ukraine the youngest (because of how they cleaned house after the Revolution of Dignity).
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  1296. Wasn't the main reason why life in '50s America was so good the fact that the US had almost no industrial competitors then (because World War II bombing had wrecked them all)? I wonder if that explains why many MAGA types are against helping Ukraine: because they don't want the 21st century's imperialist aggressors to be defeated too early? Rather they hope that Xi and Putin will somehow wreck Europe and Asia while leaving North America conveniently untouched, much as Hitler and Tojo did in the 20th century.
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  1297. Given that Russia will have a female surplus (due to all those men killed in Ukraine) while China will have a male surplus (due to the One-Child policy driving selective abortion of baby girls) I suspect a lot of Russian mail-order brides in China in the coming decade.
    1
  1298. When I heard in 2022 about Russia's plan to blockade Ukrainian grain exports (presumably to cause a famine in the Middle East and thus drive even more Muslim refugees into Europe), it made me think that this war ought to end with Ukraine having a land border with Georgia. Or as the song goes "A united Ukrainian state, free and strong from the San to the Caucasus!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R7MTG-rGCo
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  1299.  @TheWokeWarlock  Although "Krasnodar" means "Gift of the Reds" so it would need renaming, and the previous name "Katerynodar" isn't suitable either as it honours Catherine the Great. I'd suggest perhaps "Kozakodar"?
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  1300.  @pjhgerlach  That's the aspiration of Palestinians: the equivalent for Ukrainians is either "from the San to the Don" or "from the San to the Caucasus".
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  1301.  @rvarsigfusson6163  Although a lot of Ukrainians settled in that part of far-eastern Russia, to the extent that some advocated it become a new country called "Green Ukraine".
    1
  1302.  @romanplays1  Actually the current Russo-Chinese border was established in 1860.
    1
  1303.  @rvarsigfusson6163  The Ukrainian settlement in Outer Manchuria took place during the Tsarist era, not after 2014, and the creation of "Green Ukraine" was attempted during the Russian Civil War.
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  1304. MAGA types idolize the 1950s even more than the average American: I often wonder whether they actually want Europe (and Asia, once China makes its move on Taiwan) to be devastated by war again, because they want the world to be America's captive market again just like in the 1950s?
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  1305. Saddam Hussein didn't have any nuclear weapons, let alone thousands of them.
    1
  1306.  @orest7026  And it's perhaps precisely because Saddam was the last guy (prior to Putin in 2022) to try to wipe someone else's country off the map (ie Kuwait in 1990) that he was so widely seen as fair game in 2003.
    1
  1307. Europeans are a lot less hostile to Ukrainian refugees than they are to Middle Eastern refugees, largely because historically the latter tended to be overwhelmingly young men, with a tendency to sexually assault local women. Although Russia has of course abundantly weaponized Middle Eastern refugees against Europe too: first by bombing Syria into rubble, then by getting their stooge in Minsk to fly refugees in and then push them across the Polish border, and finally in this current war by plotting to cause a famine in the Middle East by cutting off its food supplies with a naval blockade in the Black Sea. That last dastardly act would (in my book at least) be a moral justification to help Ukraine not just take back its internationally-recognized borders, but also take the Kuban as well, establishing the Ukraine "від Сяну по Кавказ" described in the March of Ukrainian Nationalists.
    1
  1308. MAGA Republicans are entirely willing to sacrifice Ukraine on the altar of "owning the libs".
    1
  1309. The map of military installations in Crimea at 17:32 is captioned in Russian rather than Ukrainian: the title includes the letters Ы and Ъ, neither of which are found in the Ukrainian alphabet.
    1
  1310. Didn't the US only switch the colors round about 2000?
    1
  1311. Смерть ворогам! ("Death to enemies!")
    1
  1312.  @KevinUchihaOG  And also because the hard right tend to be more gullible than the hard left: note that a lot of the ads on US right-wing talk radio are for scams of various kinds.
    1
  1313.  @harrybruijs2614 To be fair Napoleon wasn't aiming to fundamentally challenge the Russian system: his aim was rather to force Russia to join his "Continental System" embargo of Britain. Breaking up Russia wouldn't have been in his interest, because he'd have to coerce many governments into joining his embargo, as opposed to just one.
    1
  1314.  @1stCallipostle  A NATO Ukraine directly improves Turkey's strategic situation, in a way that a NATO Sweden or Finland does not.
    1
  1315.  @marresjepie1887  And hasn't China been building its influence in the ex-Soviet "stans" of Central Asia while Russia has been pre-occupied with its meddling in the Caucasus, Syria and Ukraine?
    1
  1316.  @kathrinekerns8398 I think a lot of Trumpists want the 1950s back, when Europe and Asia were in ruins from World War II and thus virtual captive markets for American industrial products.
    1
  1317.  @lordphullautosear I wasn't aware of Trump fawning over Xi Jinping: in fact I thought his main rationale for sucking up to Putin is because he hoped (misguidedly) to reverse the Nixon/Kissinger maneuver and ally the US and Russia against China!
    1
  1318.  @bpd8426  AIUI a lot of the illegals aren't even Latin Americans let alone Mexicans: could we be seeing something similar to when Putin got his stooge Lukashenko to fly Middle Eastern refugees into Belarus and push them across the Polish border?
    1
  1319.  @bpd8426  Red states are anti-immigration because their wealth comes from the land, while blue states are pro-immigration because their wealth comes from human ingenuity. The Gulf oil kingdoms are like US red states on steroids and thus guard their citizenship jealously (with most foreigners being treated little better than slaves), while Egypt (the real Egypt following the Nile, as opposed to the roughly trapezoidal shape drawn up by European cartographers) is already grossly overpopulated.
    1
  1320. I don't think Muscovites view Russian soldiers as scum for what they're doing to Ukraine, but rather for not being smart and/or rich enough to dodge the draft.
    1
  1321. For the female soldiers would it be "Героїням слава!" instead of "Героям слава!" ?
    1
  1322. Aren't billionaires as a class usually freaks, given that most normal people would retire if they managed to make a few million dollars, rather than carry on struggling to make even more money?
    1
  1323. Is the problem in American politics arguably down to extremists on both sides: the Putin-sympathisers in the Republicans, and the open-borders crowd in the Democrats?
    1
  1324.  @TheFeldhamster  The problem is a good chunk of Americans are living in a bubble of right-wing bullshit, because it makes them feel better than real factual news.
    1
  1325.  @ffff7164  It isn't really possible for ordinary people to overthrow their own government unless either the armed forces switch sides (like the 1989 Romanian revolution) or there's a split in the ruling elite that the people can leverage (like the two 21st-century Ukrainian revolutions, where the masses sided with pro-Western elites against pro-Russian elites).
    1
  1326. Some MAGA propagandists (most notable Tucker Carlson) definitely supported Russia.
    1
  1327. Unless Russia's hope is to enrage the Ukrainians into committing more of their own war crimes (just as how the Americans were increasingly likely to shoot SS prisoners out of hand after the Malmédy massacre) so that Russian soldiers will be less likely to surrender?
    1
  1328. Some Ukrainian nationalists like to credit Carpathian Sich (who resisted the Hungarian occupation of Carpatho-Ukraine in the spring of 1939) as the first people to offer armed resistance to Axis aggression in Europe.
    1
  1329.  @robertelbrnd2003  China is another anti-Western dictatorship, Pakistan is now a virtual puppet state of China, and India is still way too dependent on Russian military equipment because the Russians are more generous than Western arms manufacturers in allowing the Indians to produce domestically.
    1
  1330. I'd blame the rise of Trump on Bill Clinton and other politicians who allowed China to join the WTO.
    1
  1331. But do the oligarchs now have the ability to stop this war, even if they wanted to?
    1
  1332. If Ukraine expels the invaders but Russia doesn't totally fall apart as a result, then I imagine the Ukrainians would be massively in demand with the NATO military leaderships, for all the lessons they can give on how to fight Russians.
    1
  1333. Unless of course they eventually plan to TAKE that bridge and carry on going until they reach the Georgian border. ;)
    1
  1334.  @CorePathway  To what extent to Americans identify with Israel because the US and Israel are both settler societies?
    1
  1335.  @CorePathway  Good point! So is support for Israel driven (in your view) by right-wingers who hate Arabs/Muslims, as well as by older generations (like Biden for example) who still have the "Israel as Cold War ally" mentality?
    1
  1336. The Japanese call the island "Karafuto".
    1
  1337. I wonder if Scholz's problem is that there are still too many pro-Russians in his own party -- the SPD after all was the party of Germany's biggest traitor Gerhard Schröder.
    1
  1338.  @venezuelaexplained2030  I understand that Venezuela is now essentially Cuba's oil colony (arguably they needed it, as Cuba suffered terribly during their "Special Period" in the 1990s after they lost the Soviet Union as a source of cheap oil). But what interest does Russia have in Venezuela?
    1
  1339. Sorry to nitpick, but wasn't it the British who (being on the left flank of the Western Allied advance that started from the D-day beaches) liberated Denmark from the Nazis?
    1
  1340.  @xzlemin9569  My thinking as a Brit is that our EU membership was a failure because we were running a chronic trade deficit for almost the whole time (except in the early '80s, when a deep recession combined with high North Sea Oil revenues). Britain's relations with the EU should be whatever would make it easiest to deal with that trade deficit. Unfortunately this war will make it far harder to deal with this, as Europe as a whole goes into trade deficit due to its new dependence on expensive American LNG to replace cheap Russian gas...
    1
  1341. I think the issue is that Putin has an especially powerful weapon in his arsenal, and it's called "MAGA".
    1
  1342. ​ @amandacrabtree7437 The problem with hydrogen is that to make it you either need to use fossil fuels (when using them directly would be much more efficient) or use electricity (when just using a battery would be much more efficient).
    1
  1343. ​ @FenryrGrey Indeed, isn't one reason why Elon has become a cult hero because he's one of the few Western businessmen to succeed in high-tech manufacturing when Western manufacturing more generally is mostly being steamrolled by the Chinese juggernaut?
    1
  1344. The problem is that I suspect Hamas's plan is to deliberately sacrifice the Gaza Strip and its people, essentially as a Palestinian Masada that would rally the Muslim world against Israel for centuries to come.
    1
  1345. While landlocked countries like Hungary can stop illegal immigration relatively easily (they can just build border walls) it's almost impossible for countries like France and Italy with south-facing coastlines to stop illegal migrants entering with small boats. Their options would be limited to stuff like naval blockades or pushbacks, both of which are likely to claim lives.
    1
  1346. October 7 2023 wasn't just the worst single day of the entire Zionist-Arab conflict, it was also Putin's 71st birthday. Perhaps Russia had a hand in the attack in order to help Putin's far-right allies in Europe by way of inflaming hatred and fear of Muslims?
    1
  1347.  @smartlucker4011  I think Iron chariot rider's argument is more that the the West will lose the will to fight when they're freezing with no gas to be had for heating.
    1
  1348.  @davidmc7442  And if he flees then won't that be the end of MAGA as it'll make it absolutely plain that he's a traitor?
    1
  1349. If China did move into Outer Manchuria, I suspect the US would back Japan to take over not just the Kuril islands but also Sakhalin Karafuto.
    1
  1350. No, the Chinese Zero Covid biosecurity state would probably be a better example of that!
    1
  1351.  @paulgibbon5991  I think the Russian logic is more "we saved the world from the Nazis, therefore we deserve to rule Eastern Europe up to the Elbe".
    1
  1352. If you're talking about right-wing talk radio, then one reason why talk radio tended right-wing is because audio media are especially well-suited to people who spend much of their lives driving.
    1
  1353.  @Brian-om2hh 6 feet under hopefully!
    1
  1354. Why do you describe the rioters in Dagestan as "Russian" (rather than "Muslim") men, given that I can definitely hear a "Takbir!" at 3:03 (along with a clear "Allahu Akbar!" at 3:19 -- it's the usual Muslim response to "Takbir!", just as for Ukrainian patriots "Героям Слава!" is the usual response to "Слава Україні!"). I'm also thinking of the incident earlier this week when a Jewish cultural centre in Nalchik (in the northwestern Caucasus) was torched: the arsonists left behind graffiti "Смерть Яхудам!". They didn't use the normal Russian word for Jews "евреи" ("Hebrews") or even the more derogatory "жиды" ("Yids") but rather "Яхуд", which is a transliteration of the Arabic word.
    1
  1355.  @TheRezro  Sort of like submarines are a powerful equalizer for countries with inferior surface navies?
    1
  1356. "The things that Putin wanted to do to the Ukraine (and Russian People) is the reason the German people chose Hitler over Stalin & Lenin's Bolsheviks." I don't think it would explain why the Germans chose Nazism in particular, rather than either a continuation of the Weimar republic or a more conventional right-wing authoritarian regime.
    1
  1357.  @dinismantas7265  Once the first batch of Ukrainian F-16 pilots are trained, would they be able to train further pilots in their own language?
    1
  1358. Or more recently what they did to Chechnya.
    1
  1359. Trump is old and decrepit and is unlikely to last another 4 years as President, and when he's finished MAGA will likely die with him. No other like-minded US politician (and certainly no-one else in the Trump family) would have similar charisma, and Elon Musk can't become President as he wasn't born in the US.
    1
  1360. Do you think this war will cause Westerners to be more sympathetic to the World War II-era UPA, and less likely to just dismiss them as "Nazi collaborators"?
    1
  1361. "Gröfaz" by the way was a satirical term for Hitler, short for "Größter Feldherr aller Zeiten" (greatest commander of all time).
    1
  1362. Captured ones presumably?
    1
  1363.  @placeholder4206  Wow, they've got a Maus? Pretty impressive when only two were even built.
    1
  1364. But he was deposed by a direct US occupation of Iraq, and nobody is going to be occupying the heartland of Russia because of its nukes.
    1
  1365. Actually he still is until the Conservative Party picks their new leader (most likely Liz Truss) next month.
    1
  1366. Although doesn't Britain have a milder version of Russia's WWII victory disease, perhaps being one of the factors contributing to Brexit?
    1
  1367. Wrong at 3:41 - the USSR only really absorbed modern Transnistria: the rest of Moldova (along with the Budjak region of Ukraine) was part of Romania between the wars. And we should also note that much of western Ukraine was ruled by Poland then: the nationalist movement that gave us the "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!" call-and-response was originally as much an anti-Polish as an anti-Soviet movement. 7:22 - Japan surrendered after just two atomic attacks because not only had the US beaten them all the way across the Pacific (they'd even taken Okinawa) but because the Soviets had entered the war and were overrunning Japan's empire in mainland Asia. If the Nazis had managed to fully defeat the USSR, I suspect that the US would have just helped fortify Britain as much as possible while defending the Middle East and defeating Japan (but not using atomic bombs: can't let the Nazis see that they actually work!) with the rest of the US war economy devoted to mass-producing atomic bombs. Once the US had enough (maybe 200-300) atomic bombs -- this would most likely be in 1948 -- they would be used in a single massive attack to destroy Germany in one day. Kind of like the "Operation Dropshot" proposed in the mid-1950s, only directed against Nazi Germany instead of the USSR.
    1
  1368. "Russians would be speaking German today if not for the allies." Actually they wouldn't exist, as the Nazis planned to exterminate them and replace them with German colonists.
    1
  1369.  @karrera8779  In 1938 it was reasonable for Western leaders to view Stalin as at least as much of a threat as Hitler, given that Stalin had already committed most of his worst atrocities (including the Holodomor and the Great Purge) while almost all of Hitler's crimes were still in the future. As for Poland refusing to let the Red Army pass to help Czechoslovakia (I think that's what you meant) then maybe the fact that the USSR tried to conquer Poland in 1920 may have had something to do with that?
    1
  1370. Chinese characters are called "hanja" in Korean: "kanji" is the Japanese term (while the Chinese term is "hanzi").
    1
  1371. The Japanese name for Sakhalin is Karafuto.
    1
  1372. You mean like how the UK refused re-entry for "ISIS bride" Shamima Begum?
    1
  1373. At least Putin won't have kompromat on her the way he does on Trump.
    1
  1374.  @dyr_glpsn4209  Isn't the main fear regarding Putin and nukes that the war goes badly enough that he sees himself as a dead man regardless, and that death by nuclear holocaust is preferable to going the way of Mussolini or Gaddafi (and that besides, he'd get to drag those Western Satanists down with him). The main obstacle to that would simply that Putin doesn't actually have a literal nuclear button that he could use to launch ICBMs all by himself.
    1
  1375. Denmark had no will to fight an actual war ever since the Germans kicked their teeth in in 1864. At least they managed to get almost all their Jews to safety in Sweden.
    1
  1376. Chamberlain and other Tories were also justifiably afraid that Stalin would be the main beneficiary of a war between the western democracies and the Nazis: note that in 1938 Stalin had already committed many of his worst atrocities while Hitler was barely getting started. Chamberlain tried to play the two totalitarian monsters off against each other, until the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact made that impossible.
    1
  1377.  @simonhenry7867  The first parallel I can think of for the decline of the Russian language in Ukraine post-2014, is how Mizrahi Jews lost their Arabic mother tongue after migrating to Israel.
    1
  1378.  @simonhenry7867  AFAIK Zelensky didn't start learning Ukrainian until he was in his 30s.
    1
  1379. Hitler would have invaded Czechoslovakia anyway even if the Western democracies had stood firm.
    1
  1380. Except how do we do that without causing a nuclear war?
    1
  1381. Merkel was actually going to reverse Traitor Schröder's nuclear phaseout policy, but then Putin enjoyed a huge stroke of luck when a tsunami destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station: the hysterical German popular reaction to this meant it would have been political suicide not to re-instate the phaseout. It reminds me of when an earthquake destroyed the Byzantine fortress at Gallipoli in 1354, clearing the way for the Ottoman invasion of Europe.
    1
  1382. True, although I suspect maintaining old Soviet aircraft may also be an issue because they'll have been produced using old dumb machine tools, which (unlike modern CNC machine tools) require very highly-trained workers to use them, which by now will mostly be dead or retired.
    1
  1383.  @jonm7272  The Internet evolved from the ARPANET, which was a US military computer network. It was the World Wide Web that Tim Berners-Lee had a big part in creating.
    1
  1384. Did Chamberlain actually believe Hitler, or was he just buying time to rearm after Hitler had got the jump on the democracies thru massive deficit spending?
    1
  1385.  @berlinkozyreva  Donbas residents mostly speak Russian, but that doesn't make them actually be Russian any more than Irish people who speak English are English.
    1
  1386. The real author of the "Morgenthau Plan" was Harry Dexter White, who was a Soviet mole aiming to drive the Germans into Stalin's arms.
    1
  1387. I wonder if Russian atrocities are a calculated ploy to force Ukraine to fight for every inch of territory, thus playing to their own strengths (especially their superior numbers of artillery) while denying the Ukrainians the full use of their advantages?
    1
  1388. Do you think that if Russia had had a more functional state apparatus that they would have attempted to copy China's Zero Covid policy? (Even though it probably wouldn't have worked, as Zero Covid in China only worked as well as it did because urban Chinese overwhelmingly live in gated communities.)
    1
  1389.  @idpro83  Kind of an aside, but it's weird how the tankie left is pretty much the only part of the political spectrum whose attitude (anti) to the Ukrainian national cause is the same as it was during the Cold War. Even a moderately conservative President Bush in 1991 was still sceptical of Ukrainian independence: think of what later became derided as the "Chicken Kiev" speech!
    1
  1390. Are there any new sanctions that could be levied on Russia, that would nullify any financial leverage that Russia may have over Donald Trump or other Republican politicians?
    1
  1391. Germany needs to prosecute Gerhard Schröder for treason and get back into nuclear energy!
    1
  1392. Why can't the sane Republicans in Greene's district remove her in the next primary election?
    1
  1393.  @Grumpyoldman037  That's likely what explains Hungary, as (IIRC) Hungarian oil refineries are specifically tuned to use Russian oil and would require major modifications to use oil from other sources.
    1
  1394. SLAVA NATSII 🇺🇦 SMERT' VOROHAM 💀
    1
  1395. Russia though (unlike the old Nazi Germany) isn't even close to being an overpopulated country.
    1
  1396. Is that the current Carpathian Sich, or the original one in 1939?
    1
  1397. Especially since American arms will be needed more to defend Taiwan, South Korea and Japan against China.
    1
  1398. I thought it was more that Ukrainian society was split between pro-Western and pro-Russian camps, with the latter largely disappearing only after Russia stole Crimea in 2014.
    1
  1399.  @Catinthehackmatrix  But at least Hitler was actually German, especially according to his own definition of Germany.
    1
  1400.  @JakeBroe  Especially when China now has a good enough car industry that an Ohio senator sees it as an existential threat to the US car industry.
    1
  1401.  @krunchie101  Kinda off-topic but I'm reminded of how Vauxhall in the UK is a fake brand. I saw someone's Vauxhall parked on the street whose badge had fallen off, and the part of the car body the badge would have been fixed to looked distinctly Opel-shaped.
    1
  1402. Are they really just stupid, or do they actually want Russia to win, for some reason that they're unwilling to be open about?
    1
  1403. The EU has no mechanism to kick out one of its own members any more than the US can kick out one of its states.
    1
  1404. One the other hand appeasement of Turkey in the 1920s (ie letting them overturn the Treaty of Sèvres by force) pretty much worked out for the West (except for Cyprus in the 1970s), How do you tell if a potential adversary is an Atatürk who can be appeased, or a Hitler who can't be?
    1
  1405. 18:23 -- actually Poland was carved up by its then-neighbours (Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Russia) in 1795. After the defeat of Napoleon Russia was awarded more of Poland as a reward for its role in the victory, with Prussia being compensated with territory in western Germany and Austria being compensated with most of what is now northern Italy. It is also notable that Austria-Hungary controlled part of modern Ukraine, and this region (escaping Tsarist Russification) played a disproportionate rise in the development of Ukrainian nationalism. The "Chervona Kalyna" song made famous in 2022 was originally written for the Sich Riflemen (who were a Ukrainian unit in the Austro-Hungarian army) and a disproportionate number of 20th century Ukrainian nationalists (including both Yevhen Konovalets and Stepan Bandera) were born in this territory.
    1
  1406. His body must be spinning like a neutron star!
    1
  1407. No, Turkey dumped Arabic for Latin more because the Arabic script (which omits most vowels) doesn't suit the Turkish language: Mehmet Paşa oldu (Muhammad became a Pasha) and Mehmet Paşa öldü (Muhammad Pasha died) were famously written identically in the Arabic script. By contrast, the Cyrillic script (being designed specifically for Slavic languages) suits Ukrainian very well.
    1
  1408. He wants to starve Africa in order to flood Europe with refugees.
    1
  1409.  @laars0001  It would have to be seriously horrific stuff (child porn? snuff films depicting real murders?) to make someone work for an enemy nation!
    1
  1410.  @natalieturko4808  Look into the "American Ethane Company".
    1
  1411.  @bradkubota6968  Actually temperature-wise Donetsk (which I'll use as an example for front-line Ukraine) is pretty similar to Pyongyang, although a summer in Pyongyang is a lot wetter than in Ukraine due to the monsoon winds.
    1
  1412.  @timsullivan4566  Although Anatoly Karpov (who used to be Kasparov's arch-rival in chess) is now sitting in Putin's puppet parliament.
    1
  1413.  @Papagulag  Note though that both the French under Napoleon and the Germans under Hitler were already at war with Britain when they invaded Russia.
    1
  1414.  @jerseyshoredroneservices225  And also because he has many millions of fanatic followers.
    1
  1415. 15:27 - The fundamental mission of the political left is to redistribute elite wealth to the masses, while the mission of the political right is to defend elite wealth against this possibility. Given that the masses (who would benefit from redistribution) will always outnumber the elite, it's in the left's interest to appeal to the interest the masses would have in redistribution, while it's in the right's interest to muddy the waters by attacking the left as (for example) "an affront to God" or "a threat to national security". The characteristic flaws of left and right derive from this: left-wingers tend to political romanticism which depicts politics in general as a battle between the masses and the moneyed elites, and denies that the masses can ever themselves be wrong or short-sighted. By contrast, right-wing politics tends to be fond of conmen and grifters (with Trump being an excellent example of one), because at its heart it is after all a conspiracy to dupe the masses into not raising their living standards at the elite's expense.
    1
  1416. Would proving Trump's treachery (by telling him something secret but not important) help beat him in the election?
    1
  1417.  @JakeBroe  And every 88 that was defending the Reich from the RAF and USAAF was one less 88 to shoot at Red Army tanks on the Eastern Front.
    1
  1418.  @fars8229  My understanding is that just as the Luftwaffe in 1940 made the mistake of switching their focus from the RAF airfields to London, so the Allied bomber forces later in the war made a similar mistake of switching their focus from the Ruhr to Berlin.
    1
  1419. Would that just be the 4 southern Kuril islands, or would it include also the rest of the Kuril island chain (which the Japanese call Chishima) and/or Sakhalin island (Karafuto to the Japanese)?
    1
  1420. I suspect a lot of the pro-Russian Germans just want their cheap gas back.
    1
  1421. Does Biden need to resign in favour of a younger Democrat who stands a better chance of stopping Trump?
    1
  1422. Isn't the Lincoln Project already doing a great job with anti-MAGA campaigning?
    1
  1423. Why do they need to man their other borders: isn't their huge nuclear arsenal a sufficient deterrent to invaders?
    1
  1424. Or putler has kompromat on Trump (maybe sourced from Epstein's island)?
    1
  1425.  @JakeBroe  I'd date it more to the 2012 Presidential election, which convinced (mainly but not only) Republicans that US politics was turning into a game of racial head-counts.
    1
  1426.  @mmccarthy9458  Do you mean Downton Abbey ?
    1
  1427.  @Fish29077  Looking at the footage they seem to be Muslim immigrants (and their descendants?) rather than white neo-Nazis.
    1
  1428.  @hughjazz64  I thought the Irish were generally very pro-Ukraine, often likening the Ukrainian Holodomor to the 19th-century Irish potato famine. Where Ireland is outside the Western mainstream is that they tend to side with Palestine over Israel.
    1
  1429. Are you a Brit confusing Geert Wilders with Nigel Farage?
    1
  1430. Perhaps because the leading anchors of Fox News (Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity) are Putin's stooges?
    1
  1431. Given that Geert Wilders is more than anything else an anti-Muslim hatemonger, I'd have suspected the Hamas attack on Israel was a much bigger factor.
    1
  1432.  @nexstbob6911  Western monetary aid to Ukraine always came mainly from the EU: the US is (was) primarily a supplier of _weapons_.
    1
  1433. The West isn't getting involved directly because of the Cold-War-era doctrine that any direct combat between NATO and Russian forces will escalate uncontrollably to nuclear armageddon.
    1
  1434. The Kremlin believe that their huge nuclear arsenal gives them impunity.
    1
  1435.  @batbilegochirpurev5029  Either that or have an independent Buryatia.
    1
  1436. ​ @jimgraham6722  The main thing that's stopping Republicans supporting Ukraine currently is fear of a Trump-supported primary challenger, so perhaps we'll see more movement once the primary season is over? Incidentally, it appears that Trump's desperate need for money (to pay both campaign expenses and legal bills) may have allowed the Chinese to buy him too (which is why MAGA politicians are now defending Chinese-owned TikTok). Might that scupper Trump's chances given how most American conservatives are far more hostile to China than they are to Russia?
    1
  1437. I think the MAGA types just hate inflation and believe flooding the energy markets again with Russian oil and gas will fix it.
    1
  1438. Musk's role in making EVs aspirational made him an obvious threat to the Russian petrostate, and he was obviously too much of an egomaniac to realize that this would make him a target to be suborned by the Russian intelligence services.
    1
  1439. Perhaps we should call it Muscovy again, so that it doesn't get the free-ride on the glory that was Kyivan Rus?
    1
  1440. @citrosoda5370 People who can't get jobs because of them?
    1
  1441.  user-nz2tt1tl2t American racist slavery came to exist because the Native American holocaust meant that there was no Malthusian pressure to keep wages down, meaning that non-economic coercion (most effectively applied to workers who were visually different from the rest of the population) was needed instead.
    1
  1442.  user-nz2tt1tl2t My argument was specifically about slavery in the Americas.
    1
  1443. Zakarpattia Oblast: between the World Wars it was part of Czechoslovakia. As Czechoslovakia fell apart in March 1939 it briefly declared independence as Carpatho-Ukraine but was conquered by Hungary in just a few days -- however Ukrainian nationalists today like to claim that the defense of Carpatho-Ukraine was the first armed resistance to Axis aggression in Europe.
    1
  1444. I don't know how they'd expect such propaganda to help them: no-one likes a monopolist, especially when the monopolist is also a murdering thug!
    1
  1445. I think you mean "President-Elect Kamala Harris": she wouldn't actually be President until the inauguration in January 2025.
    1
  1446.  @guardsman2018  I was thinking more of African countries whose economies (likely due to the colonialist legacy) are often based almost entirely on exporting a small number of mineral resources or agricultural products, and which hope for a change in the world order that increases the price of said products.
    1
  1447. Note that today's nuclear ICBMs are the highly-developed successors to the V-2 rocket of World War II, which was literally described by its Nazi creators as a "vengeance weapon".
    1
  1448. Heroyam Slava!
    1
  1449. Don't buy that: the Black Sea Fleet is trapped in the Black Sea by the Turks, while the Ukrainians can't realistically reach any of Russia's other three fleets (the Northern Fleet in the Arctic, the Baltic Fleet in Kaliningrad or the Pacific Fleet in Vladivostok).
    1
  1450.  @AIAudiobooks411  He was the fall guy after Liz Truss wrecked the economy.
    1
  1451. @emilyw3483 October 7 is Putin's birthday.
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  1452. The notion that Russia is out to deliberately cause a famine in the Middle East (presumably in order to flood Europe with starving Muslim refugees) sounds so diabolical that I think it's the best argument yet for that old Ukrainian nationalist aspiration of "from the San to the Caucasus". After all, we didn't let Germany keep all its pre-war territory after WWII, and can a Russia that does this be trusted with any kind of presence on the Black Sea?
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  1453. ​ @stefansekulic7903 Indeed, Mongolia was the very first Soviet puppet state.
    1
  1454.  @Warren_Peace  Which is why I view European politicians opposed to nuclear power as traitors. The worst of all was former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who actually got a plum job at Russian pipeline company Nordstream right after leaving office.
    1
  1455.  @jimness5902  I'd rather see it turned into a museum of Putin's regime, much like the "Puppet Emperor's Palace" in Changchun that memorializes the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo.
    1
  1456. I'd disagree with that, given that Chinese Manchuria has been losing population for quite some time now -- it's the Chinese rust belt, with China's modern industrial juggernaut being in the Pearl River delta far to the south.
    1
  1457. Although Russians and their sympathisers claim that "Glory to the Heroes" is fascist, because it originated in the 1930s with the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
    1
  1458. 30 million Soviet citizens, and many of those (especially the civilian dead) will have been Belarusians and Ukrainians.
    1
  1459. Wouldn't we also want to see Georgia joining NATO, of course after throwing out their current pro-Russian government? I suspect Putin put nuclear weapons in Belarus to forestall any ideas that NATO should help liberate Belarus from Putin's stooge Lukashenko?
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  1460.  @jamesmaybrick2001  I was one of those who voted against Brexit, but I wouldn't say it was "smart" people who voted against it as a group (and this kind of talk also helps inflame populist hostility to perceived intellectual elites). The real split in the referendum vote was more down to age than anything else, with those born after 1975 both a lot more likely to have been to university, and a lot less likely to be nostalgic for a Britain before EEC/EU membership.
    1
  1461.  @annabelvnoucek2148  A big part of contemporary Russian ideology is the belief that the world owes Russia because of the tens of millions of Soviet lives lost fighting the Nazis. Many of Brexit's staunchest rank-and-file supporters also have a bit of an obsession with WWII (and a hatred of Germany perhaps rooted in envy of its industrial prowess) and I wonder if Putin believed that these people were his natural allies? It didn't work out for him: while (for example) a strong majority of Britain's national newspapers were pro-Brexit, not one of them adopted a pro-Russian stance last year: in fact, the Daily Express (traditionally one of the most xenophobic and right-wing UK newspapers) now even has "United with the People of Ukraine" and a Ukrainian flag on its front page. In fact, the UK is somewhat atypical among Western countries in that what pro-Russian sympathies do exist here are found more in the extreme left than in the extreme right.
    1
  1462.  @annabelvnoucek2148  Where in the UK do you live? My impression was that EEC/EU membership was great for London and South East England, but may have helped exacerbate deindustrialization in the rest of England, explaining another split in the referendum vote (London voting Remain, provincial England voting Leave).
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  1463. Perhaps the Saar would have been a better example to use there?
    1
  1464. I thought that most appeasers in the West are motivated either by greed for cheap fossil fuels or fear of nuclear war, not resentment at taxes.
    1
  1465.  @David-gh6vp  The Russians aren't quite as incompetent as Arab armies though.
    1
  1466. That's more like how China views Taiwan. It may have been more accurate if Ukraine had become an almost totally Russian-speaking country (much as how Ireland is almost totally English-speaking today).
    1
  1467. Did you mean "Героям слава!" for the second one?
    1
  1468. Isn't "i" pronounced like the "i" in English "machine" while "y" (и in Ukrainian Cyrillic) is pronounced like the "i" in English "bit"? You may be confusing the Ukrainian sound transliterated as "y" with the similarly-transliterated Russian sound (ы in Russian Cyrillic) which is pulled further back in the mouth compared to the Ukrainian or standard English sound.
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  1469.  @DavidGirling  I thought Russia's has far fewer WIA per KIA than western armies, because of how terrible its frontline medical facilities are.
    1
  1470.  @stephenhill545  Wasn't the Russian economy roughly the same size as the combined Benelux economies?
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  1471.  @pl7868  I sometimes wonder if it should be compulsory for made-in-China goods to be marked with a big Chinese flag, much like health warnings on cigarette packets.
    1
  1472. Remember Finland was a German ally (for understandable reasons though) which meant that once Norway fell Sweden was basically surrounded by Axis territory.
    1
  1473. Actually Luhansk is the Ukrainian pronunciation while Lugansk is the Russian pronunciation: the old Slavic G turned into an H in Ukrainian (as well as Czech and Slovak, which is why the Czechs call their capital "Praha"). My guess on how Kyiv is pronounced is that it would be something like how a working-class Englishman would pronounce "Keev".
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  1474.  @peterc.1419  Arguably West Germany also had border disputes with Poland and the USSR at the time: wasn't it still officially claiming the 1937 borders?
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  1475.  @bobjohnbowles  How much do you think that fear of high Muslim birthrates is driving the trend towards authoritarian pro-natalism amongst Western far-right factions?
    1
  1476. ​ @navypowertv Yevhen Konovalets (the first leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists) had Lithuanian citizenship.
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  1477.  @S0ulinth3machin3  I think you mean "they claim that they aren't racist"...
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  1478. How much do you think that explains the unwillingness of countries like Germany to support Ukraine: fear that if Russia does badly enough in this war they'll drag the whole world down with them in a nuclear holocaust?
    1
  1479.  @dizzydog3350  I voted Remain in 2016 precisely because David Cameron's government VETOED EU tariffs on cheap Chinese steel. What the hell was he thinking???
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  1480. I wouldn't describe the problem as "politicians trying to be generals" per se: the issue in both cases is that the war was fought in the back yard of a hostile nuclear power (China in Vietnam's case) which the US was afraid to anger too much for fear of nuclear war.
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  1481.  @80sand90sonly  Perhaps because Cubans are almost all wretchedly poor (even their leaders) and would thus be "losers" in Trump's eyes?
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  1482. I don't think it particularly matters to those on the receiving end if the drone attacking them are Iranian-made or Russian-made.
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  1483. It's said that FDR took on the robber-baron monopolists at home before he took on the Nazis and the Japs...
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  1484. The island you're thinking of is known in Russian as Sakhalin or in Japanese as Karafuto.
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  1485. "Соборна Українськая держава — Вільна й міцна, від Сяну по Кавказ!" ("A united Ukrainian state — Free and strong, from the San to the Caucasus!")
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  1486. When you say "Russian wheat" do you mean wheat grown in Russia or wheat stolen from Ukraine?
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  1487.  @grahamstrouse1165  I don't buy the notion that ignorance or stupidity drive support for right-wing demagogues. More plausible in my view is that she represents a largely rural Georgia district which no doubt contains lots of huge homes (expensive to heat in winter and to air-condition in summer) whose residents drive big gas-guzzling SUVs and pickup trucks. Perhaps these voters think that if they help Russia conquer Ukraine, then Putin will reward them with lots of cheap oil and gas, or perhaps even have their back against the environmentalists who are trying to kill off their way of life for the benefit of "mud people" in the global South threatened by climate change?
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  1488. Probably pumped on Theodor Morell's drugs...
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  1489.  denniswilson8013  The first treaty between Russia and Japan was the 1855 Treaty of Shimoda, where Russia had the northern Kurils and Japan the southern Kurils, with Sakhalin's status undetermined. This was followed by the 1875 Treaty of St Petersburg, where Japan recognized Sakhalin as Russian but claimed the entire Kuril island chain. And after the Russo-Japanese war ended in 1905, the Treaty of Portsmouth resulted in Japan taking the half of Sakhalin south of latitude 50.
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  1490. Do you have a source for that? It doesn't seem like Stalin to describe the USSR as an "empire" (even though of course it was one in reality).
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  1491. ​ @SoundofSilence492  The West made the same mistake re Crimea in 2014 as they did re the Sudetenland in 1938: they let an aggressor take over a land where their own co-ethnics were a majority.
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  1492.  @mdjey2  Which is probably why he changed the flag of Belarus from the former white-red-white flag (still used by the Belarusian opposition) to the flag (minus the hammer and sickle) of the former Belarusian SSR.
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  1493.  @petersinclair3997  Wallachia actually (it's now the southern part of Romania) and the invaders he was defending against were Ottoman Turks. When the Ottomans eventually killed him, his head was displayed on a spike in Istanbul.
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  1494. The purpose of the Salisbury poisonings was to intimidate Paul Manafort, who was then in a US federal prison awaiting trial, whose partner had just pleaded guilty, and who Putin feared was about to rat out potentially dozens of other Russian moles in the US. Since Putin's GRU hitmen couldn't practically get into the US prison, they decided instead to kill Yulia Skripal (who was about the same age as Manafort's daughter) to send him a message. This is why the GRU used a poison that specifically identified the Russian state as the attacker, and why they waited for Yulia to arrive back home (because she was indeed the intended target, not her father Sergei). When Manafort eventually pleaded guilty himself, the GRU's boss Korobov was invited into a meeting with Putin and was never seen alive again.
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  1495.  @seraph3761  While there are a tiny minority of extreme leftists in the US who hate their own country, I don't think "anti-American" is a fair label for the far larger number of right-wing Putin sympathizers. Some of these people are simply misguided -- having been indoctrinated by people like Tucker Carlson -- but I can't help feeling that other MAGA supporters see Putin as a defender of the fossil-fuelled way of life against the environmentalists aiming to destroy it.
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  1496.  @gustavmeyrink_2.0  I'm not sure whether the past dalliances between the Tories and Russia are really that relevant now, given that the Tories will likely be suffering a landslide defeat in the election for other reasons.
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  1497. "Vil'na i micna, vid Sjanu po Kavkaz!"
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  1498. You'd think a climate campaigner would despise Russia along with all the other petrostates...
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  1499. Correct that Hokkaido was colonised relatively late: that's why Sapporo's street grid resembles that of a Texan city downtown.
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  1500.  mauriziocorradi1598  They are descended from a neo-fascist party though.
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  1501. It's no surprise that countries in Central and Eastern Europe tend to be very ethnonationalist (as ethnic self-determination was how these countries justified their fight for independence against German, Austrian, Russian or Turkish empires) but it's absolutely shocking that far-right nationalists in most of these countries today side with Russian imperialism over Ukrainian self-determination: Stepan Bandera must be spinning in his grave! And it's doubly surprising that the one CEE country (other than Ukraine itself of course) where even the far right is solidly anti-Russian is Poland: the very country that was the main victim of Bandera's followers!
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  1502. Surely the Putin-stooge candidate in the next US Presidential Election will be RFK Jr rather than Trump?
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  1503. Some commentators argue that the breakup of Russia is actually the best option, as they argue it is the only thing that would destroy Russian imperialism once and for all.
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  1504. AIUI most illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border aren't Mexicans these days: many of them are from further south, and fleeing wars between governments, rival drug cartels, and (in some countries like Colombia) communist terrorists. This warfare in Central (and northern South) America is perhaps the reason why Latinos are the only major American ethnic group that has a lower murder rate in the US than in their ancestral homelands -- compare with how white Americans have a higher murder rate than Europeans, black Americans have a higher murder rate than black Africans (except South Africans), and Asian-Americans have a hugely higher murder rate than Asians in Asia.
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  1505. Why do his supporters insist then on referring to Bakhmut as "Artyomovsk": a name adopted in 1924 and derived from the nickname of a prominent Bolshevik?
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  1506. A warship that is now at the bottom of the Black Sea where it belongs.
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  1507.  @dolorescooper5943  One of the biggest gripes of Trump supporters AIUI is "inflation": perhaps they believe the world can't do without Russian oil and gas?
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  1508.  @kjellg6532  Why are you advocating parliamentarianism: have you read Juan Linz's "The Failure of Presidential Democracy" by any chance?
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  1509. To me it reminds me more of the armored trains of the Russian Civil War.
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  1510.  @bernardvc5820  Except that Ukraine's is the nationalism of an oppressed nation, not that of an imperialist oppressor. Russia and its sympathisers call Ukrainians "Nazis" because of people like Stepan Bandera, obscuring the fact that even a Bandera (with all his blunders and atrocities) was fundamentally a decolonizer, while Hitler was a recolonizer.
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  1511.  @pouncepounce7417  The main thing that makes China so scary is its awesome manufacturing capabilities (as much as the entire Free World combined) which it could potentially use to win the next world war by outproducing its enemies, much as the Allies outproduced the Axis in World War II.
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  1512.  @Patricia-gn5bi  In the original music video for March of the New Army (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgdANpB9PnY ) the backdrop of a trident with a sword through the middle is the original emblem of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
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  1513. I think the fear isn't so much that Russia would attack NATO with the intention (or even hope) of actually _winning_, but that they'd launch their nukes at the West as a "take the bastards with us" thing. After all, the ancestors of today's nuclear ICBMs are Hitler's V-2 rockets, that were literally labelled as a "vengeance weapon".
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  1514.  @BassPhat  Surely the fear is that Putin will fire the nukes because he's losing so badly that he figures he's a dead man anyway, so he might as well "take the bastards with me"? Remember that today's ICBMs are just the highly-developed successors of Hitler's V-2 rockets, literally labelled a "vengeance weapon".
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  1515.  @billwebb9643  I wonder if Russia has pissed off the West badly enough for them to consider removing the present population? Especially since Kaliningrad is itself pretty much an overgrown military base...
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  1516.  @stevebeer3324  Many western Ukrainians celebrated the defeat of Poland in 1939 even though they despised the new Soviet rulers.
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  1517.  @Calligraphybooster  They can't, because there are a lot more "only Trumpers" than "never Trumpers" in the Republican electorate. If Trump wasn't the nominee he'd run as an independent, split the vote and guarantee a Biden victory.
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  1518.  @jounik  If all Putin cared about was money then he wouldn't have invaded Ukraine in the first place.
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  1519. Regarding USD domination, is it not arguable that while it is certainly good for Wall Street and for American geopolitical influence, it isn't good for ordinary Americans, as the holder of the world's reserve currency is practically forced to run a major trade deficit, and pay the price for that in the form of either higher debt or higher unemployment? A mercantilist country like China will never have the world's reserve currency, because that would be directly at odds with its current aim of stealing jobs from the rest of the world by exporting more than it imports.
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  1520. Wouldn't the Russian threat to the grain ships come not from surface ships, but from mines, submarines and ground- or air-launched missiles?
    1
  1521. Mostly just Africa now.
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  1522. Because Ukraine doesn't have its own nuclear weapons. (But then if it did it wouldn't have been invaded in the first place.)
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  1523.  @danieljames2015  The president's age is a problem in part because of his VP's race and gender.
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  1524. And even if Canadians did want to join the USA (admittedly unthinkable when Trump is POTUS) isn't it more likely that would be the 51st thru 57th states (as the 4 Atlantic provinces would likely be combined into one state)?
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  1525. I suspect the "Ukrainian Nazi" slur is basically about how post-Maidan Ukraine has adopted symbolism (like the now-famous "Glory to Ukraine! Glory to the Heroes!" call and response) that has its origins in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
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  1526. Surely Gaza must be the ultimate refutation of the anti-welfare eugenicist right wing, given how their population continues to increase in spite of nightmarish living conditions far worse than any US inner city ghetto?
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  1527.  @charlieboy6315  They'd never agree to that, because with Russia's conventional military being exposed as a paper tiger, and with the level of hatred that Russia has unleashed with their atrocities in Ukraine, surely they must realize that their nukes are the only thing keeping their vengeful neighbours from tearing them apart.
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  1528.  @tomslastname5560  I'm kind of surprised Jake doesn't yet know how to read Cyrillic script.
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  1529. They won't because of what Kim will do to their families if they do.
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  1530. Doesn't Russia now have a huge incentive to blow up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, hoping that another nuclear disaster will derail any attempt by Europeans to get back into the nuclear energy game in order to break their addiction to Russian gas?
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  1531. Wasn't Israel's 1967 sneak attack on the Egyptian Air Force so successful because the Egyptian air defense radars were actually turned off, out of fear that Muslim Brotherhood sympathisers in the Egyptian military would try to shoot down the presidential plane?
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  1532. Have the drug traffickers managed yet to build narco subs that don't need a human pilot?
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  1533.  @peterhoulihan9766  My understanding is that the Irish army are great peacekeepers but no good in a real high-intensity war.
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  1534. Can Russia be a democracy in its 2010 borders, or does it need to be broken up further?
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  1535.  @peterfireflylund  Surely if Japan wanted any Russian territory it would be Sakhalin Karafuto?
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  1536. Wouldn't a Chinese invasion of the Russian Far East with the intention of bypassing the "first island chain" to the north be futile, because the US response would be give Japan a green light to claim Sakhalin Oblast (or as the Japanese call it, Karafuto and Chishima)?
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  1537. Trump actually got considerably more votes in 2020 than in 2016 (although the Democratic vote increased by more still): likely protest votes against Covid shutdowns.
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  1538.  @julianskinner3697  While Germany may have gone down quicker if Britain and France had fought in 1938, perhaps "World War II" in that world would have referred to a later big war started by Stalin?
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  1539. Why not just respond to them with a "Русский тролль, иди на хуй!" before blocking them?
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  1540. "Darwin's waiting room" -- are you implying that GA14 has a very elderly electorate?
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  1541. Soviet propagandists used to accuse Ukrainian patriots of being both "Nazis" and pro-Israeli, so the "Judeo-Banderite" trope certainly has decades of history behind it.
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  1542. This war's "1938" was 2014 -- Crimea is full of Russians just as the Sudetenland was full of Germans.
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  1543. Wouldn't the Red Army have already pushed the Nazis back into Poland by the time the Tiger II was seeing front-line action?
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  1544.  @andysnyder4506  I'm sure that once Crimea is liberated Ukraine will institute an Israeli-style Law of Return for the Crimean Tatars. But remember where the word "refusenik" came from: will Russia be any more inclined to let Tatars leave for a Ukrainian Crimea as the old USSR was to let Jews leave for Israel?
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  1545. Unless of course the Russian Black Sea Fleet actually ends up causing a big famine in the Middle East, which may radicalize the west to the point that the plan becomes for the Ukrainians to take the bridge, and then not stop until they get to the Georgian border.
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  1546. Ceterum censeo MAGAm esse delendam.
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  1547. Isn't Germany dithering largely because they know their enormous chemical industry is fucked without cheap Russian gas? Germany long prided itself on its trade surplus (which for a long time was right up there with China's) but starting in May they slipped into deficit for the first time since reunification, because they were having to pay through the nose to buy gas from the United States and other alternative suppliers. And IIRC BASF is already moving much of its operations from Germany to Louisiana, precisely because gas is so much cheaper there.
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  1548.  @scipioafricanus5871  Although Derbent (in the far south of Dagestan) was a northern bastion of the 7th century Islamic Caliphate. The rest of Dagestan was Islamized a lot later (along with Chechnya) and this is reflected in the native languages of southern Dagestan: the Lezgin word for "north" is "kefer" (= "infidel") while the Rutul word for "north" is "jahannam" (= "hell").
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  1549. Wasn't going to happen as the Sevastopol naval base was leased to Russia.
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  1550. Do you have any accounts on sites (eg Mastodon, BlueSky, Threads) often promoted as alternatives to Twitter/X?
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  1551.  @steve470  If any Democratic Senators voted against then they were most likely voting against Israel.
    1
  1552. ​ @andyhurrell Russia hacked Fox News to help him win the 2016 GOP primary.
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  1553. Нєт Марджорі, Нєт Марджорі! Брешеш ти усьому світу щo ти "зa мир"!
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  1554. Musk was too big of an egomaniac to realize that (as the man who made EVs something to aspire to) he'd be targeted by the intelligence services of the Russian petrostate. Of course they couldn't simply kill him (as that would just make him a martyr and accelerate the transition to EVs) so they had to manipulate him into destroying himself.
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  1555. Norway is of course swimming in oil and gas money though...
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  1556. Why am I translating "final victory" in my head as "Endsieg"?
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  1557. "then you show the clips of Ukrainian children playing and Russian children being trained for war.Why does that remind me of a scene in Prelude to War (the first of the famous Why We Fight series of World War II propaganda films)?
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  1558. Your point about production is why I'm terrified that China will put its gargantuan industrial capacity behind Russia's war effort.
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  1559. China especially wouldn't want the world's reserve currency, because having such is incompatible with their mercantilist economic model.
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  1560.  @RichardRodi526  Did the ground even freeze properly in either of the winters we've had so far in this war?
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  1561.  @mushroomsteve  I think you mean the Polish uprising of 1944, not the Jewish ghetto uprising of the previous year.
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  1562.  @arnejorgensen4788  I wonder if Europe simply no longer has the ammunition factories in existence any more.
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  1563. So a bit like a US Congressional mid-term election then.
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  1564. Was tying Ukraine aid to Israel aid a mistake, because it has stopped some Democrats (including the "Squad") from voting for the discharge petition, while failing to entice more than one Republican to vote for it?
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  1565. The MAGAts don't care about such atrocities as long as they get some cheap oil and gas.
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  1566. Yup, "sovereignty" as defined by Russians means something closer to "impunity".
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  1567. Do you expect Trump's win will result in a strengthening of the Entente Cordiale?
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  1568. It perturbs me that the song "March of Ukrainian Nationalists" has become my musical guilty pleasure even though that song was written as the anthem of a more-or-less fascist organization.
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  1569.  @dreadpenguinlord340  The problem isn't so much with the man at the top, but with the whole Muscovite culture of unquestioning obedience to authority: in fact a common epithet used to attack Russians who insist on thinking for themselves is ментальный украинец ("mentally Ukrainian")! Also note that not only did the Bolsheviks who killed the last Tsar ended up just as despotic themselves (if not more so), but also how many of the Tsar's officer corps basically went like lambs to the slaughter after the Bolshevik takeover, rather than attempting to fight back.
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  1570. Not quite: ISIS was a literal doomsday cult, and we'd all be dead already if they'd had a Russia-sized nuclear arsenal.
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  1571. How likely is it that Japan will extend its claims beyond just the southern 4 Kuril islands to also include Chishima (the rest of the Kuril island chain) and/or Karafuto (Sakhalin island)?
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  1572. Do you think the United States or any other Western nation will join Ukraine in recognizing the 4 southernmost Kuril islands as Japanese?
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  1573. My thought is that they see the Russian petrostate as a bulwark against environmentalists who threaten their way of life. Or as James Howard Kunstler put it in 2005, "Americans will vote for cornpone Nazis before they will give up their entitlement to a McHouse and a McCar".
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  1574.  @Katoshi_Takagumi  Putin wouldn't be deterrable by western nukes if he thinks he's going to be lynched (like Mussolini or Gaddafi) anyway. In that circumstance he would certainly chose death by nuclear holocaust over death by lynching as he'd get to drag the West down with him. As Winston Churchill put it "the deterrent does not cover the case of lunatics or dictators in the mood of Hitler when he found himself in his final dug-out". The flaw in this manner of reasoning is that the ICBMs almost certainly cannot be launched by Putin personally, and thus would have to be launched by military personnel who (unlike Putin in this scenario) actually do have something to lose.
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  1575.  @dr.williams5251  Did Putin's (laundered) money help her win her primary?
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  1576.  @Katoshi_Takagumi  The nightmare scenario would be if China was to put its awesome industrial base behind Russia's war effort, as it could outproduce the Free World just as the US outproduced Germany and Japan in World War II.
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  1577. Actually it's pronounced "coo" because final consonants are mostly not pronounced in French.
    1
  1578. Novorossiysk is pronounced "noh-vara-SEESK" more-or-less.
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  1579.  @Calamity-Spice  I guess the way UKIP exploited the European Parliament shows one of the drawbacks of PR.
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  1580. No, WWII started because the Nazis believed the only way Germans could achieve American-level prosperity was to control an America-sized territory.
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  1581.  @MissUnderstood-f9l  The hold up in Congress goes back to 2014: the Russians didn't just start attacking Ukraine then, but also began engineering the rise of the MAGA movement with their penetration of the Fox News email server.
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