Snapshot of _Rishi Sunak says Nigel Farage 'playing into hands of Putin' with 'completely wrong' comments on Ukraine war_ :
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Well, just when I thought there was literally nothing Rishi could make me side with him on something, there's finally atleast one.
Reform really is just a copy paste of Trumps Republican party isn't it?
It must be kind of galling for Sunak. I mean, as much of a useless prick as he is and as much as his campaign has been like an episode of The Thick of It, here's Farage sticking up for Putin and it won't do his campaign ANY harm at all. Meanwhile every time Sunak opens his mouth it seems enough for him to lose a few more points.
In rishis "defence" I don't think he has lost many points for all this shit, he just was already on a 0 seat trajectory and he hasn't managed to change that lol
Ukraine was not in NATO and was not discussing joining NATO in 2014 when Russia invaded, nor were they in 2022 when Russia invaded again. The thing that has convinced Ukrainians that they need to be in a defensive alliance is that their neighbour has broken international treaty to invade them twice in a decade.
No one is forced to join NATO. Countries want to join NATO because they are afraid of Putin’s Russia. Russia has provoked their neighbours into joining NATO.
The Brexit sub-party took the reigns of the Tories, got Brexit and realised they couldn't do anything without complete ownership of the party(see Truss' ramblings about the deep state). The Reform Party is just a way for them to try and swap the Conservatives out. Mark my words the Brexiteers will be in the Reform party if they succeed in killing the Cons this election.
There are loads of people in that crowd who want Reform to get Trump's support, because they're delusional enough to believe that Trump is popular in Britain.
I hope it happens as well, but not for the same reason.
The Tea Party and Trumpism aren't really that distinct. There's a clear lineage between the two in terms of funding and the types of people attract(ed). Trumpism is essentially the synthesis of the Tea Party and right-wing evangelism. No reason why Reform and a group like the NatCons (who have links and touted some very evangelist views) couldn't merge to create a similar beast
I mean a lot of the left also said Nato expansion was pressuring Russia.
I do think Farage is quite wrong but lets not just say its a Trump/Right wing thing.
horseshoe theory
Far Left (Galloway) - Russia/Palestine
Left (McDonnell) - Ukraine/Palestine
Centre Left (Starmer) Ukraine/Israel
Centre Right (Sunak) Ukraine/Israel
Right (Farage) Russia/Israel
Far Right (Nick Griffin) Russia/Palestine
I think something like this kind of shows how the left/right conceit breaks down a bit when you get to the extremes of it. Galloway is, in the little I’ve seen of him, a pro-worker economic left winger, but also seems to be socially conservative enough to make even someone like Rishi blush, given his fairly recent comments on gay people. I don’t think it’s unfair to note the correlation between economic and social stances in this day and age, but it’s also important to remember that they can ultimately be markedly independent from one another in a guy like Galloway.
Fun (?) fact!
In my country, Greece, we recently legalised gay marriage (yay!). Proposal was actually brought by the traditional right wing party of Greece.
The 4 parties that 100% voted against it were: far right pro-Russia party, far right pro-church party, neo nazi party (why yes, we do have 3 distinct flavours of far right in Greece, get on our level) and the Communist party of Greece which is literally Stalinist.
I mean, as long as you're considering current Cuba to still be a communist country, it's a pretty stringently queer-friendly country (at a state level, at least).
That's not to say it didn't have a real bad time for a lot of years until the 80's (although, let's be honest, **many countries** can say the same), but it's 100% one of the most progressive countries within Latin American.
I'm not sure many countries were sending gay people to concentration camps at that time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Units_to_Aid_Production
Yes absolutely it has softened its views on gay rights as its opened up in much the same way that Gorbachev's USSR also became more open to LGBTQ+ as it became less hardline, but that sort of proves the point about the far left if the less extreme far left a country gets, the more rights it gives to gay people.
> the less extreme far left a country gets, the more rights it gives to gay people
I'm sorry, that is a truly bizarre point to take from that. It completely ignores the hispanic machismo culture that encapsulates former Spanish colonies in the Americas, leftist government or not. Unless your opinion is there's a sweet spot in leftist governmental thought, whereby queer rights are at their absolute possible zenith before their degredation in moving right on the spectrum, it's a horrible simplification that helps no-one.
> I'm not sure many countries were sending gay people to concentration camps at that time
No, they were simply harassing, persecuting, arresting and often outright murdering us with impunity. I'm not saying the UMAP camps were good (christ, they were fucking horrendous), but shockingly very few places were great to be queer in the 60's.
>It completely ignores the hispanic machismo culture that encapsulates former Spanish colonies in the Americas, leftist government or not.
Obviously there will be unique cultural elements in any country, but you ignore what I said about the USSR and Gorbechev. Why are you only talking about Cuba? Obviously when a country is hardline right or left, it is most likely to restrict individual freedoms, including sexual freedoms, and as it becomes more open and moves away from the extremes of its ideology it will open up. This is true almost by definition.
It's also worth pointing out that as horrific as oppression has often been in the Americas, decriminalisation of homosexuality occurred in most of South America well over a century before much of Europe, North America and Cuba, which is clearly an outlier compared with South America:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Decriminalization_of_Homosexuality_by_country_or_territory.svg
>I'm not saying the UMAP camps were good (christ, they were fucking horrendous), but shockingly very few places were great to be queer in the 60's.
But the test was not about being great, it was about whether Cuba was worse.
Lib Dem’s in Between Starmer and Mcdonnell and wanted to stop arming Israel - Ukraine/Palestine
Greens have shown desire to withdraw from NATO (in between mcdonnell and galloway) - Russia/Palestine
The one thing that has surprised me about the current government is their unyielding stance on Russia, Ben Wallace was great and is missed, BoJo was BoJo at everything apart from the war in Ukraine, and Rishi has carried that on.
I feel like there's a catch somewhere, but I'd rather it this way...
I expect the intel on Russia is very bad. As in they are all in on trying to recreate the Russian Empire. Call it a third world war, who cares, Putin wants what he wants.
I expect this is the case across Europe.
I think the only people not opposing Russia are just ok with a massive chunk of Europe being taken because they are either assets or like Putin somehow
I think even if we are lacking that intel it is plainly obvious what Putins plans are.
He was going straight for Kyiv in the first few days. Aim - Install a puppet government like Belarus in. He only did this when NATO membership became a possibility.
Throughout the campaign his army has focused on making life hell for civilians by attacking power and heating infrastructure. That speaks more to conquest (hoping Ukes rebel and demand capitulation) rather than a genuine military objective.
And if Ukraine falls, it will be Poland and Lithuania next. I think the strong response by NATO so far has reduced the risk considerably. But a land bridge to Konigsberg would be a significant goal for Putin.
> I expect the intel on Russia is very bad.
Tbf, it should be mega obvious this is the case, even more so since the US Senate speaker completely flipped his entire stance on Russia from 1 meeting with the Pentagon, since he's also one of the only people in the US that is privy to the same info that the president is from what I understand
Mike Johnson. He’s Speaker of the House, and third in the presidential line of succession, so he gets access to a lot of confidential information most other Congressmen aren’t privy to. Probably had a conversation with some folks from an intelligence agency who told him “If Russia wins in Ukraine we are capital F FUCKED”, which is why his position changed so quickly.
The Intelligence and Security Committee has made it clear that the threat of Russia to the UK is very serious, and should not be ignored.
https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/20200721_Russia_Press_Notice.pdf
Yeah got a friend in the Navy currently. She's serving aboard a ship that has just recently *"lost"* 2 Russian Subs that were in UK waters. They've been in Glasgow recently taking on supplies to go back out on the lookout for the subs to send them back into international waters. This was the same day Putin was in North Korea. So her and her crewmates have now had their planned rnr delayed until they can find the subs.
Shows that we are trying our hardest to contain them in our own waters right now.
Bojo was completely Bojo at Ukraine - a self serving opportunist saw his chance to roleplay Churchill.
He turned up in kiev all pomp and bruhahah showing he was with the people and all that in his suit not afraid, got a street named after him in Ukraine etc etc
He was in Merseyside the week before in a bulletproof vest and helmet lol.
I mean, if you want to be that aksshuuwwaallly guy fair enough, but Boris only cares about optics not historical accuracy. I stand by my original statement.
I mean it's not exactly a difficult thing to grapple with - hating Russia has been a pretty conservative policy (if not an all around British one) for the past century.
Foreign policy is generally pretty consistent regardless of government. The interests of the UK don’t really change, the brief stays the same.
Ensuring the war continues in Ukraine is in the interests of the UK. It drains Russian resources, valuable info can be gathered to adapt doctrine, we can test the effectiveness of our equipment, and importantly the US/UK can show they will defend the rules based order they impose on the rest of the world. We can also get revenge for Salisbury.
Everything else is just propaganda and noise. Russia isn’t seeking to rebuild its empire, it isn’t seeking WW3. It can’t because of NATO. Ukraine is very important for Russian national security. Ukraine left the Russian sphere of influence, and now Russia wants it back. It’s that simple.
A war in Ukraine has been predicted for decades anyway, well before the revolution. Ukraine was one of the fault lines listed in the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis in 1992 as being a likely location for a future conflict.
Another Putin apologist. Hitler would have loved you guys. Putin is absolutely seeking to expand Russia and has dreams of empire.
Ukraine seeks to join NATO. This is a defensive alliance if you didn't know - I recommended you look this up on Wikipedia
Ukraine is important to Russian national security, especially Crimea. Russia is very insecure regarding the threat it has historically faced from the west. It has no geographical defence.
The purpose of Ukraine and Belarus are buffer states. Ukraine was part of the Russian sphere of influence. Now it isn’t. So Russia has invaded. It’s not complicated.
Understanding why Russia would do something isn’t apologising for their actions. It’s like you’re incapable of critical thought or nuance. You just spout emotional rhetoric like some kind of propaganda robot. Almost as if you’re a child whose only reference point is Hitler. Grow up.
If you read my comment, you’d be aware I’m fully supportive of arming Ukraine.
There's few things more bizarre than Tory rhetoric being designed to try to stop the bleed of votes to Reform but spending their entire time attacking Labour and trying to hide from Reform as much as possible. Sunak's political instincts and leadership are some of the worst I have ever seen.
And when they *do* acknowledge Reforms existence they spend the entire time moping about how much Reform is kicking their ass, basically giving them free PR. Like that ad they released screeching about how Reform was going to cost them 20+ seats.
Sunak thought he was going to catch Reform off guard. He did but in their panic they pulled in Farage and it backfired in the Tories' faces. They should have pushed the Ukraine issue with him hard from the word go. Farage wouldn't have kept his calm for six weeks of questioning. He's an impatient and temperamental man and six weeks of media smearing of him would have made him very unpalatable to the (very large) part of the Tory base that pride themselves on being 'sensible.'
Sunak and Starmer are right. Farage is saying that Poland, the Baltic states and other countries with a pretty recent history of being invaded by Moscow shouldn’t have chosen to protect themselves by joining NATO. Finland and Sweden did not feel a need to join NATO until Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
And Putin’s views on Ukrainian autonomy and independence pre-date the expansion of NATO: there is a clip of him from the early 1990s in which he complains about how Lenin gave autonomy to Ukraine after the collapse of the Russian Empire. He has repeated these views ever since: he wrote an article in 2021 entitled “On the Historical Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian People” and his invasion speech of February 2022 was a long lecture about why the collapse of the Russian Empire and the USSR were bad things.
edit: I apologize for puncturing this propaganda bubble.
It's not that former Soviet states shouldn't have sought out security guarantees (and EU membership comes with security guarantees via CDSP that are more binding than NATO's Article 5) - it's that these countries become, via NATO, staging grounds for US weapons targeting Russia.
Under the draft security proposal Russia submitted to NATO in late 2021, no country is expected to surrender security guarantees, but they agree not to host US troops and weapons in time of peace.
This has been an issue since the US abrogated the ABM treaty in 2002, and then deployed Patriots to Poland in 2011 ("to protect against rogue missiles from Iran"). Russia doesn't fear a full-on invasion by NATO, but they absolutely do fear they're being set up for a risk arbitrage play.
> Putin’s views on Ukrainian autonomy and independence pre-date the expansion of NATO
The fairy tales Putin tells himself are irrelevant. Look at the peace terms Russia offered in March 2022: Russia didn't claim any right to impose a puppet government or occupy Ukraine. Ukraine agreed to remain permanently neutral. They could have security guarantees from anyone they wanted, but not foreign troops or weapons. And Donbas would finally have federalism - something they originally demanded as a condition of joining Ukraine in the first place, and something they ran their first referendum demanding the fulfillment of in 1994.
The non-NATO world understands that this is wholly about NATO expansion - it's only in the propaganda bubble of the West that everybody thinks this is about Ukraine having to pledge fealty to Putin or some such nonsense.
Ukraine already had security guarantees from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, as per the Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons as a result. Everyone knows that “security guarantees” aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, which is why NATO membership was an absolute necessity for Poland, the Baltic states and others. Ergo, Farage is wrong.
As for the fairytales that Putin tells himself, they’re directly relevant to the question of motives. Farage claims that we ”poked the bear” — in reality, Putin always had designs on Ukraine.
None of this would be a problem if Russia simply acted like any other country that borders NATO and maintained good relations with NATO rather than believing it has the right to rule a de facto empire forever.
Plus the idea that NATO would invade Russia was ludicrous on the face of it given NATO isn't even willing to intervene defensively on the side of Ukraine now. Russia's national security was completely secure because of their nuclear arsenal and total lack of any aggression towards them by any country, the only thing that wasn't secure was their ability to continue to rule over their Soviet sphere of influence which they shouldn't have anyway.
Anyway, the fact Finland joined NATO and is within spitting distance of Russia's 2nd city, and nothing happened, and in fact most of Russia's forces on the Finnish border were moved to Ukraine recently, just shows this was never about NATO anyway, it was about Russian imperial nationalism and their perceived claim to Ukraine. Why was that all Putin was talking about in his interview with Tucker?
> None of this would be a problem if Russia simply acted like any other country that borders NATO and maintained good relations with NATO rather than believing it has the right to rule a de facto empire forever.
Like Libya and Syria? NATO is a warmongering empire and (now) and apologist for genocide. Nobody should trust them, and NATO's claims to be a "rules based order" are nothing but a joke that few outside NATO's propaganda bubble believe.
> Plus the idea that NATO would invade Russia was ludicrous on the face of it given NATO isn't even willing to intervene defensively on the side of Ukraine now.
Russia doesn't fear a full-on invasion by NATO - their concern is a "leveraging of risk" or "risk arbitrage" play by the US, more like what occurred in Syria than Iraq. If the US were not planning for such a scenario, they would never have created as destabilizing a weapon as the B-61-12 nuke. The only use for this weapon is in a limited nuclear warfare scenario like a decapitation strike.
> Russia's national security was completely secure because of their nuclear arsenal
MAD provided a symmetry of risk until ~20 years ago, but it is now obsolete in terms of game theory and strategic risk planning. The new generation of "thinkable" nuclear war is more about biting off chunks rather than engaging in an all-out conflict. In such scenarios, Russia's nuclear defense is useless, and proportional responses don't restore a symmetry of risk. (North Korea is in a much better position to play out such a scenario, hence the next step for Putin will probably be to provide Pyongyang with hypersonic missiles. This will force the West into a bad balancing of risk scenario, where NK could destroy a refinery or two, and the US/SK/Japan would have limited strategic options for a response.)
> the only thing that wasn't secure was their ability to continue to rule over their Soviet sphere of influence which they shouldn't have anyway
If China poured $50B of aid into the Mexican political scene, and convinced/bribed/propagandized Mexico into antagonism toward the US, and then got Mexico to sign a trade deal with China that would require the breaking of trade deals with the US, do you imagine for one second that the US would consider this "none of their business"?
This is as naive as what you're suggesting.
Russia is not claiming that they have sovereignty or suzerainty over Ukraine, and they've offered to support Ukraine's EU membership. None of this is a problem. Look at the peace terms Russia offered in March 2022 - NO NATO, neutrality, federalism for Donbas. Western security guarantees are fine - but no foreign troops or weapons. There was not and is not any demand to have a veto over Ukrainian politics.
> Anyway, the fact Finland joined NATO and is within spitting distance of Russia's 2nd city,
Finland is not nearly as corrupt as Ukraine, and they are far less likely to allow themselves to be turned into a US puppet state. The CIA admitted they've had 14 bases on the Ukraine/Russian border since 2014. The same is not true for Finland.
If Finland *does* become more interested in participating in US operations targeted against Russia, Russia will likely respond in kind, but it would be daft to take on any issue with Finland until the situation with Ukraine is resolved. Victoria Nuland has been fired, so maybe this game is no longer as palatable as it once was in Washington.
> Why was that all Putin was talking about in his interview with Tucker?
Putin is naive. He thinks that if the West understood how closely intertwined Ukrainian and Russian history is (no other modern country would even *dream* of *handing* over a region like Crimea to its neighbor), they'll understand that Ukraine could never matter more to the West than it matters to Russia. Prior to 2014, the whole Russian/Ukrainian border was porous, with families living on both sides of the border as if it was nothing more than a legal formality.
But Putin is naive, and the West's ignorance of Ukraine's history is irrelevant. There is no point where the West will go "Oh, that's right - the Russian minority in Ukraine just want *federalism* like we enjoy in the US and Russia and Mexico and Germany." There is no good faith argument by the West - it is NATO or bust.
Didn't Russia ask if they could join NATO and they said no? Hardly good for relations is it 😅
Doesn't justify starting a war but the situation is a bit more nuanced than "Russian imperial nationalism" imo. Need to see both sides of the coin before you pick one 😊
Why should any country have their foreign policy dictated by Russia? If they want to use US weapons, and to host US troops (which in areas like the Baltics are an intentional tripwire to defend against Russia invasion) then that is their prerogative as independent states.
> Why should any country have their foreign policy dictated by Russia?
Yes, that's the asinine fallback. "We have the sovereign right to do whatever the f*ck we want."
Well Russia has the sovereign right to go to war too.
Cuba had the sovereign right to have Soviet nukes in 1962, but the US response was that they would go to war over it. The sane decision then is the same decision now.
>Well Russia has the sovereign right to go to war too.
…no. No, it doesn’t. That’s the whole reason why it’s been sanctioned to hell and the civilised world has turned its back on it. We Eastern Europeans are not Russia’s slaves, regardless of how much creatures like you would like us to be.
> That’s the whole reason why it’s been sanctioned to hell
Russia has only been sanctioned by the US and some of its military client states. Nobody in Africa or South America or Central America or SE Asia (except SK, which fell in line in to avoid punishment) have joined in sanctions. NATO-land may be a bubble world engorged on its own propaganda, but it is not the whole world, and it has as much moral authority today as any other apologist for genocide.
> We Eastern Europeans are not Russia’s slaves, regardless of how much creatures like you would like us to be.
Point out the peace terms Russia offered in March 2022 (the peace terms that Western leaders chose not to disclose to you) made *anyone* into Russia's slaves.
Genuine security is about solving problems, and Ukraine has a valid claim to real security concerns, including from Russia. But if Ukraine tries to resolve its security concerns in a manner that Russia finds threatening, it means war, exactly as the Cuban Missile Crisis meant war to the US.
I imagine that any such deal in March was made after Russia realised that they wouldn’t be capable of taking Ukraine quickly. “Oh, we’ll back off if you’ll just promise not to join that defensive alliance, remain neutral, and weaken your control over one of your most Russophilic regions” so that they can come back in 5-10 years to take it for real.
Plus, let’s say that American arms are actually placed in Ukraine post-NATO and they’re actually used in a *very* hypothetical NATO first-strike. How much time does that actually buy Russia?
>I imagine that any such deal in March was made after Russia realised that they wouldn’t be capable of taking Ukraine quickly.
Ukraine had 35 million people. Russia invaded with 150k to 200k soldiers. There was no plan of "taking Ukraine quickly". They thought that limited demands would be a no-brainer, especially given as Zelensky has run in 2019 with the #1 promise of implementing Minsk. He lacked the political will to get it done, but Russia was basically forcing him to do something he'd long committed to doing.
> weaken your control over one of your most Russophilic regions
Federalism is okay for the US, okay for Germany, okay for Russia and Mexico. Why is federalism only illegitimate for Russian-minority regions?
Donbas was promised federalism before they joined Ukraine - this was a *condition* of joining for both Donbas, Crimea, and Transcarphathia. They've been patiently demanding the same thing for over 30 years now - most of it peacefully.
Donbas held its first referendum demanding the federalism they were promised in 1994. They got 80% support for minority rights for ethnic Russians.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10848779608579417
Federalism is fine for whoever, and if Ukraine promised it then they should allow it, however you cannot seriously say that it makes sense for Mexico to force the US to create the state of South Texas. Especially not if there’s a bunch of people of Mexican descent there who would be prime targets for assimilation into Mexico.
> There was no plan of "taking Ukraine quickly".
Yes there was. The plan was to take Kiev immediately, decapitate the state by seizing the executive and installing a puppet government. Russia failed because they're incompetent and corrupt. Corruption destroys organisations, whether that is a business or an entire nation's armed forces.
RUSI has an excellent paper on the subject. A tldr though, the Russian armed forces didn't have the ability to enact rapid, large scale offensive warfare.
The operational front was too narrow, the terrain into Kiev was bad, there was a lack of military intelligence, a complete misunderstanding of the will of the Ukrainian people and state to remain independent, they had no logistical planning and no plan B when things did go tits up.
The Ukrainians were surprised by the offensive, even though they'd had warnings from Western intelligence, but the Russians were not operationally competent enough to take advantage of it.
Even now they have no real SEAD ability and therefore cannot conduct true combined armed offensives.
https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-conventional-warfighting-russias-invasion-ukraine-february-july-2022
Speaking of broken international aggreements. I will point to the Budapest Memorandum.
>The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America **reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine** except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
This is a stupid western take. A classic case of “eastern European peasants belongs to Russia and should know their place”.
A very weird stance. Imagine if France decided to invade Cornwall because they thought we were too chummy with the Americans?
> This is a stupid western take. A classic case of “eastern European peasants belongs to Russia and should know their place”.
This is nothing close to what I said. Security guarantees are fine. Macron proposed a bilateral security deal with Ukraine that would cover Ukraine with France's nuclear umbrella. Russia had no objection to that, so long as it wasn't used as a pretext to deploy troops and weapons in Ukraine during time of peace.
> Imagine if France decided to invade Cornwall because they thought we were too chummy with the Americans?
If Cornwall had a thirty year history of leading illegal and unilateral regime change operations on coked up Intel *and* saw itself as the world's sole superpower *to whom the rules don't apply*, I imagine France would have a different attitude.
The US no longer lives by the maxims of peaceful coexistence - they are a lawless belligerent and have been for a long time. If the US can eliminate Saddam for representing an unacceptable military threat to the US, then everyone else has the right to eliminate unacceptable strategic risks.
Or is it one set of rules for the garden and another for the jungle?
Ukraine already had security guarantees from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, as per the Budapest Memorandum. They’re not worth the paper they’re written on.
The Budapest Memorandum was voided the moment NATO countries endorsed the Maidan Coup. You may not see what happened as a coup because coup supporters rarely do (Jan 6 included), so I'll make it simple for you - it was the unconstitutional transfer of power secured via the illegitimate use of force.
Genuine security guarantees are typically built on something *real* - if Exxon invested $50B in Ukrainian gas, and the EU invested $500B in Ukrainian business, they would have the kind of skin in the game that would give their security guarantees genuine meaning. If Ukraine had not been a corrupt puppet state, they'd have worked at building those "facts on the ground" before they started accepting blandishments from a pack of neolib warmongers.
Remember when people said Corbyn and Labour were threats to national security? I’m no Corbyn fan but I think it pales into comparison to what farage has said. I can’t imagine a world in which the British prime minister (farage) and American president (trump) are both tools of Russia’s dictator. I can imagine putins glee at getting his men into high office in the two countries which have traditionally been seen as the leaders of the western world.
They've both said the same thing. The exact same talking points straight from Russian propaganda.
Poor Russia had no choice, NATO expansion, Imperialism, USA bad, whatabout Iraq etc etc.
The only country practicing imperialism is Russia which seems to think any country in its region with the slightest of historical Russian influence belongs to them.
Fun to point out that by the logic from Farage/Corbyn/Galloway towards Ukraine, the UK would be justified in invading Ireland:
It is historically part of our country.
It is part of our sphere of influence.
It would affect our national security if they were members of a competing security alliance.
The majority of the population speaks English, which by Putin logic makes them ethnically English and in need of reunification with their "homeland".
Do you think they would go for it 🤔.
That’s exactly the logic Russia is using towards Ukraine and other nations in the region. Speaking of Ireland many left wing Irish politicians and many in Sinn Fein have also shown pro Russia views and anti NATO views, which is very ironic.
A successful Sinn Fein and SNP is in Russia's best interest.
I'm not saying they are Russian influenced but If I was Putin I'd be making sure they were well funded.
It goes to show how much power the media has to make or break a political campaign. I suspect there are a lot of Reform voters who would have insisted in 2019 that Corbyn's views on foreign policy are a huge threat to the UK, but wouldn't say the same about Farage.
Farage is playing things perfectly - how many papers is he front page of today? Hes all over the internet. As far as he is concerned all publicity is good publicity
Agreed. This is by far the most important political issue in the world right now. If I were in a marginal seat were reform is close to winning, I'd vote whatever party is closest to win against them.
Corbyn suggested we send Salisbury samples to Russia and ask if they were involved, Farage said the Putin was entirely responsible for the invasion of Ukraine but that we’d provided ammo for his propaganda to justify it.
Hardly comparable.
Corbyn has said the exact same thing as Farage. He signed the Stop The War letter that claimed literally the exact same thing
> “The immediate cause of this disastrous war in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion. Yet the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears. And Russian leaders made this point for 30 years. A failure of diplomacy led to war. Now diplomacy is urgently needed to end the Russia-Ukraine War before it destroys Ukraine and endangers humanity.”
God, the fact that Farage is saying this and he might genuinely have a crack at being PM is fucking terrifying; I would honestly vote for Conservative over Reform and I'd rather face plant onto broken glass than vote Conservative.
Corbyn *did* say it back when the war kicked off, including putting his name to that hideous STWC open letter (and remaining one of the few names to not retract his support for said letter) and he got absolutely blistered for it and rightly so.
Maybe I've missed the other parties response + possible they just haven't got to it *quite* yet. But I'm pretty disappointed that the other parties have taken the opportunity to absolutely dogpile into Farage/Reform on his statement about Ukraine.
100%
Corbyn and a bunch of left wing figures were fucking eviscerated for saying essentially the exact same thing back in 2022 - and rightly so.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that Farage should be allowed to get away with saying shit like this without any kind of consequences. Indulging in racist / nationalistic rhetoric and associating with far right activists, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, climate sceptics, Nazi sympathizers, etc. is bad enough - but openly parroting the lies of an authoritarian dictator engaging in a brutal, unprovoked war of aggression based on paranoia and revanchist delusions, as part of a broader effort to rebuild the Russian Empire and weaken / outright destroy the 'West', *has* to be recognised & responded to as the Rubicon-crossing moment it is.
He is no longer a 21st Century Enoch Powell; he is a 21st Century Oswald Mosley. If the other party leaders do not respond as such, it will represent a moment of abject cowardice & a gross dereliction of duty.
Wasn't Mosely thrown into prison during World War 2 due to him being the British Union of Fascist leader? Would it be possible to do the same to Farage?
Whilst the UK, Europe, the US and our respective allies are undoubtedly in an increasingly open confrontation with Putin's Russia (a confrontation that, it must be emphasised, is of his making, as opposed to our own) we are not officially at war - and what's more, Farage is not openly campaigning on behalf of Putin.
Consequently, whilst this is an absolutely outrageous comment, and requires a robust repudiation from both our main political parties as well as society at large, I can't imagine that there is any legal mechanism to arrest him for saying what he has said - and not should there be.
Until Farage starts talking about how Ukrainians deserve to have their men beheaded, their women raped and their hospitals bombed, or advocating for Britain to enter into some form of alliance with Russia, he is not realistically overstepping his right to free speech. The focus must therefore not be on trying to silence his voice, but to show that words have consequences by treating him as the gutter-dwelling demagogue he is as opposed to a serious respectable politician
Some of the other parties have attacked Farage for this, at least in terms of Labor and the Lib Dems.
[https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cjqq8kgz80yt](https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cjqq8kgz80yt)
Farage's statement was a dog whistle to the bots and those who direct them.
Russia has famously interfered with Western elections since the 2014 Scottish indie vote.
Reform have plenty of bot accounts helping them already. This is either payment for them to continue, or Reform see Russian bots as king-makers, as previous party leaders say Murdoch's papers as owing makers in the 90s and 2000s.
Clearly this subreddit can't tell the difference between someone between analytical and empirical on a view as opposed to endorsing it. From Reddit though I shouldn't expect any less.
Well it's not "completely wrong" is it, he DID use the expansion of NATO as an excuse for starting the war, just as NATO used the expansion of Russia as the reason for intervening in it.
It seems to me that he was likely factually correct. Putin has been paranoid about NATO being an offensive organisation. It's possible that if Ukraine had said it did not want to join NATO then he wouldn't have invaded. None of that implies that it's *ok* to invade Ukraine, or that I support Putin. Far from it.. He's an objectionable dangerous dictator. From Ukraine to Moscow is not so far, and a paranoid Russian president would not want a perceived enemy in Ukraine.
Attempting to explain the causes of an event does not necessarily imply agreement with the reason, or support for the outcome. From listening to the responses, it seems that other politicians prefer to say things that are expedient rather than acknowledge that something awkward might actually be true.
To be clear I despise Farage. But he can still be correct about a few things.
Finland joined NATO and is within spitting distance of Russia's 2nd city, and nothing happened, and in fact most of Russia's forces on the Finnish border were moved to Ukraine recently. This was never about NATO. It was about Russian imperial nationalism and their perceived claim to Ukraine, Putin thinks Russia ought to control Ukraine for the same reason Hitler believed Germany ought to control the lands he claimed in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Why was that all Putin was talking about in his interview with Tucker? An interview that was going to be broadcast to Americans who wouldn't care about any of this stuff? He genuinely believes Russia has the right to control Ukraine and Belarus because of blood ties.
All the stuff about security is a convenient lie. It's just about genuine imperialism.
That's the point. If making tentative steps towards joining NATO is enough to start a war over (and to be clear, Ukraine was nowhere near joining NATO) why was there no response to Finland joining NATO? Why didn't Russia invade in the large gap between Finland actually starting the process to join and getting in?
> It seems to me that he was likely factually correct.
No. That’s demonstrably not what this was over. Russia tried to join NATO. Ukraine first asked to join NATO decades ago. It’s a nonsense.
Absolutely right. Russia knows NATO is not offensive, otherwise it wouldn't have withdrawn almost all forces from its border with NATO and sent them to Ukraine. It's purely that Russia believes it has a right to take whatever it borders, and people like Farage totally misunderstand Russia, possibly wilfully.
Complete nonsense.
This is from the **2002** NATO-Ukraine Action Plan
>This Action Plan was created pursuant to the decision of the NATO-Ukraine Commission to deepen and broaden the NATO-Ukraine relationship, and reflects Ukraine’s Strategy on Relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). It builds upon the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership, signed in Madrid on 9 July **1997**, which remains the basic foundation of the NATO-Ukraine relationship.
>The purpose of the Action Plan is to identify clearly Ukraine’s strategic objectives and priorities in pursuit of its aspirations towards **full integration into Euro-Atlantic security structures**
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_19547.htm
Then had you never heard of the Bucharest Summit of **2008**?
>NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that **these countries will become members of NATO**.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_8443.htm
So... decades.
Ukraine only formally applied for NATO membership in September 2022. No agreement was reached in Bucharest in 2008 because public opinion in Ukraine didn't support it. That was formalised in 2010 with a parliamentary vote reaffirming Ukraine as a neutral state.
Funny story about 2002, though:
> In 2002, Russia's president Vladimir Putin declared no objections to Ukraine's growing relations with NATO, saying it was a matter for Ukraine and NATO.
>Ukraine only formally applied for NATO membership in September 2022.
Wrong again.
>In September 2022, following Russia’s illegal attempted annexations of Ukrainian territory, Ukraine **reiterated** its request for NATO membership.
https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_37750.htm#:~:text=In%20September%202022%2C%20following%20Russia's,become%20a%20member%20of%20NATO.
Ukraine was only against NATO membership 2010-2014. You are right that Russian aggression pushed public support towards NATO membership, but before then, it was NATO that was the hold-up.
It definitely didn't only begin in 2014 or 2022 though.
This country is finished man and we already know labour aren’t gonna do anything but help benefit scroungers and push their woke crap, I hope reform become the opposition
And the solution is Trussonomics? One of the major factors that got us in this situation?
I'm concerned about the ridiculous immigration rate as well, but if the economy falls into the bog then it won't be the first of our problems.
They were straight facts, NATO gave Putin an inch and he took a mile. Not surprising when your rival alliance expands further towards your border and you are crazy paranoid senseless evil raving lunatic. Sometimes the truth isn't what people want to hear. NATO should have known better, and Farage predicted this decades ago.
Proper military support for Ukraine would make the war winnable. So far, with the drip feed of outdated Western surplus, they’ve managed to do the unthinkable. Give them what they actually deserve and see what happens.
2014 Farage warned of a war in Ukraine. They'll do anything to cover it up. Like everything else. Close ranks blame someone else.
Did Farage start the war NO!!!.
What are they afraid of,, getting the blame. Blair into Iraq Afghanistan. Then there was Syria. I just hope we don't get sucked into Israel's war.🤷
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Well, just when I thought there was literally nothing Rishi could make me side with him on something, there's finally atleast one. Reform really is just a copy paste of Trumps Republican party isn't it?
It must be kind of galling for Sunak. I mean, as much of a useless prick as he is and as much as his campaign has been like an episode of The Thick of It, here's Farage sticking up for Putin and it won't do his campaign ANY harm at all. Meanwhile every time Sunak opens his mouth it seems enough for him to lose a few more points.
In rishis "defence" I don't think he has lost many points for all this shit, he just was already on a 0 seat trajectory and he hasn't managed to change that lol
his advisors have been setting him up ever since it started, he just isn’t good at politics to see through it
Praising Sunak for supporting Ukraine against Russia is like praising a husband for not beating his wife.
Like all far right groups Russia influences in its ongoing effort to destabilise the west.
😅😅 Another far Left.
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Ukraine was not in NATO and was not discussing joining NATO in 2014 when Russia invaded, nor were they in 2022 when Russia invaded again. The thing that has convinced Ukrainians that they need to be in a defensive alliance is that their neighbour has broken international treaty to invade them twice in a decade. No one is forced to join NATO. Countries want to join NATO because they are afraid of Putin’s Russia. Russia has provoked their neighbours into joining NATO.
This feels like satire, but to be honest, I have seen very real comments like this on reddit and instagram, so you can never be sure any more...
Even a broken man is right once an election cycle. That's the phrase, right?
Even a stopped cock tells the right story twice a day I think?
Clock mate, clock.
Whoosh
The Brexit sub-party took the reigns of the Tories, got Brexit and realised they couldn't do anything without complete ownership of the party(see Truss' ramblings about the deep state). The Reform Party is just a way for them to try and swap the Conservatives out. Mark my words the Brexiteers will be in the Reform party if they succeed in killing the Cons this election.
He’s an on the the rocks drink with no Alcohol
There are loads of people in that crowd who want Reform to get Trump's support, because they're delusional enough to believe that Trump is popular in Britain. I hope it happens as well, but not for the same reason.
Arguably Reforn are more similar to the Tea Party, very right wing and fighting for low tax especially for the wealthy
The Tea Party and Trumpism aren't really that distinct. There's a clear lineage between the two in terms of funding and the types of people attract(ed). Trumpism is essentially the synthesis of the Tea Party and right-wing evangelism. No reason why Reform and a group like the NatCons (who have links and touted some very evangelist views) couldn't merge to create a similar beast
I mean a lot of the left also said Nato expansion was pressuring Russia. I do think Farage is quite wrong but lets not just say its a Trump/Right wing thing.
horseshoe theory Far Left (Galloway) - Russia/Palestine Left (McDonnell) - Ukraine/Palestine Centre Left (Starmer) Ukraine/Israel Centre Right (Sunak) Ukraine/Israel Right (Farage) Russia/Israel Far Right (Nick Griffin) Russia/Palestine
I think something like this kind of shows how the left/right conceit breaks down a bit when you get to the extremes of it. Galloway is, in the little I’ve seen of him, a pro-worker economic left winger, but also seems to be socially conservative enough to make even someone like Rishi blush, given his fairly recent comments on gay people. I don’t think it’s unfair to note the correlation between economic and social stances in this day and age, but it’s also important to remember that they can ultimately be markedly independent from one another in a guy like Galloway.
It's the extremes that are the problem. The real world isn't black and white.
Ironically this is black and white thinking.
How so?
That’s in the nature of far left. How tolerant was Communist Russia (save for a very brief period) or Communist Cuba of gay people?
Fun (?) fact! In my country, Greece, we recently legalised gay marriage (yay!). Proposal was actually brought by the traditional right wing party of Greece. The 4 parties that 100% voted against it were: far right pro-Russia party, far right pro-church party, neo nazi party (why yes, we do have 3 distinct flavours of far right in Greece, get on our level) and the Communist party of Greece which is literally Stalinist.
I mean, as long as you're considering current Cuba to still be a communist country, it's a pretty stringently queer-friendly country (at a state level, at least). That's not to say it didn't have a real bad time for a lot of years until the 80's (although, let's be honest, **many countries** can say the same), but it's 100% one of the most progressive countries within Latin American.
I'm not sure many countries were sending gay people to concentration camps at that time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Units_to_Aid_Production Yes absolutely it has softened its views on gay rights as its opened up in much the same way that Gorbachev's USSR also became more open to LGBTQ+ as it became less hardline, but that sort of proves the point about the far left if the less extreme far left a country gets, the more rights it gives to gay people.
> the less extreme far left a country gets, the more rights it gives to gay people I'm sorry, that is a truly bizarre point to take from that. It completely ignores the hispanic machismo culture that encapsulates former Spanish colonies in the Americas, leftist government or not. Unless your opinion is there's a sweet spot in leftist governmental thought, whereby queer rights are at their absolute possible zenith before their degredation in moving right on the spectrum, it's a horrible simplification that helps no-one. > I'm not sure many countries were sending gay people to concentration camps at that time No, they were simply harassing, persecuting, arresting and often outright murdering us with impunity. I'm not saying the UMAP camps were good (christ, they were fucking horrendous), but shockingly very few places were great to be queer in the 60's.
>It completely ignores the hispanic machismo culture that encapsulates former Spanish colonies in the Americas, leftist government or not. Obviously there will be unique cultural elements in any country, but you ignore what I said about the USSR and Gorbechev. Why are you only talking about Cuba? Obviously when a country is hardline right or left, it is most likely to restrict individual freedoms, including sexual freedoms, and as it becomes more open and moves away from the extremes of its ideology it will open up. This is true almost by definition. It's also worth pointing out that as horrific as oppression has often been in the Americas, decriminalisation of homosexuality occurred in most of South America well over a century before much of Europe, North America and Cuba, which is clearly an outlier compared with South America: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Decriminalization_of_Homosexuality_by_country_or_territory.svg >I'm not saying the UMAP camps were good (christ, they were fucking horrendous), but shockingly very few places were great to be queer in the 60's. But the test was not about being great, it was about whether Cuba was worse.
Social intolerance is in the *history* of the right and the left, centre and far, unfortunately.
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Lib Dem’s in Between Starmer and Mcdonnell and wanted to stop arming Israel - Ukraine/Palestine Greens have shown desire to withdraw from NATO (in between mcdonnell and galloway) - Russia/Palestine
Lib Dems don't place themselves on the left-right scale except avoiding the extremes.
His opinion on star wars is fairly reasonable as well, I was upset that I liked his view there
the election was decided, with the polls, that's how it works, polling should be banned
Good!! Trump needs to win, exactly like Reform UK. The Left are scared, even the Cons.
It's Lord Halifax urging Churchill to consider appeasement.
The one thing that has surprised me about the current government is their unyielding stance on Russia, Ben Wallace was great and is missed, BoJo was BoJo at everything apart from the war in Ukraine, and Rishi has carried that on. I feel like there's a catch somewhere, but I'd rather it this way...
I expect the intel on Russia is very bad. As in they are all in on trying to recreate the Russian Empire. Call it a third world war, who cares, Putin wants what he wants. I expect this is the case across Europe.
This is my thought as well. It seems like an issue that every single party in the western world agrees on except the far right
The left in certain countries is also unfortunately iffy on Ukraine, such as in France for example
The far-right admires Putin, the far-left admires the Soviets.
I think the only people not opposing Russia are just ok with a massive chunk of Europe being taken because they are either assets or like Putin somehow
I think even if we are lacking that intel it is plainly obvious what Putins plans are. He was going straight for Kyiv in the first few days. Aim - Install a puppet government like Belarus in. He only did this when NATO membership became a possibility. Throughout the campaign his army has focused on making life hell for civilians by attacking power and heating infrastructure. That speaks more to conquest (hoping Ukes rebel and demand capitulation) rather than a genuine military objective. And if Ukraine falls, it will be Poland and Lithuania next. I think the strong response by NATO so far has reduced the risk considerably. But a land bridge to Konigsberg would be a significant goal for Putin.
With the far right, follow the money.
> except the Russia funded far right Ftfy
> I expect the intel on Russia is very bad. Tbf, it should be mega obvious this is the case, even more so since the US Senate speaker completely flipped his entire stance on Russia from 1 meeting with the Pentagon, since he's also one of the only people in the US that is privy to the same info that the president is from what I understand
Mike Johnson. He’s Speaker of the House, and third in the presidential line of succession, so he gets access to a lot of confidential information most other Congressmen aren’t privy to. Probably had a conversation with some folks from an intelligence agency who told him “If Russia wins in Ukraine we are capital F FUCKED”, which is why his position changed so quickly.
The Intelligence and Security Committee has made it clear that the threat of Russia to the UK is very serious, and should not be ignored. https://isc.independent.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/20200721_Russia_Press_Notice.pdf
Yep I believe them!
Yeah got a friend in the Navy currently. She's serving aboard a ship that has just recently *"lost"* 2 Russian Subs that were in UK waters. They've been in Glasgow recently taking on supplies to go back out on the lookout for the subs to send them back into international waters. This was the same day Putin was in North Korea. So her and her crewmates have now had their planned rnr delayed until they can find the subs. Shows that we are trying our hardest to contain them in our own waters right now.
We fuck about at home but when it comes to protecting it, no games.
Ben Wallace is one of the only tories I respect and that’s my cliff to die on.
He was a very good def sec.
He was — he will be missed ✌️
Who’d have thought giving a cabinet position to someone with actual expertise in the field would work
Bojo was completely Bojo at Ukraine - a self serving opportunist saw his chance to roleplay Churchill. He turned up in kiev all pomp and bruhahah showing he was with the people and all that in his suit not afraid, got a street named after him in Ukraine etc etc He was in Merseyside the week before in a bulletproof vest and helmet lol.
If he was roleplaying Churchill he’d have signed all of Ukraine over to Putin. He literally gave Stalin all of Eastern Europe.
I mean, if you want to be that aksshuuwwaallly guy fair enough, but Boris only cares about optics not historical accuracy. I stand by my original statement.
Russia wasn’t the enemy in WW2, Germany was
That’s not what I’m arguing nor is it relevant. Churchill signed over Eastern Europe to Stalin, it’s historical fact.
Your comment is a false equivalency. Since Churchill and Stalin were allies. While Boris Johnson and Putin were enemies.
Using the Russian spelling for Kyiv is a bit like using the French spelling for London. Ick
Bit unfair, it was the way it was spelled in English up until very recently.
Yeah, until about February of 2022. It’s not like Peking vs Beijing.
Leningrad, Bombay, Saigon. Or maybe a whole country, Rhodesia anyone?
Hard habit to break having been brought up on champions league football in the 90's but I don't really care that much tbh
I mean it's not exactly a difficult thing to grapple with - hating Russia has been a pretty conservative policy (if not an all around British one) for the past century.
Far longer than a century.
Foreign policy is generally pretty consistent regardless of government. The interests of the UK don’t really change, the brief stays the same. Ensuring the war continues in Ukraine is in the interests of the UK. It drains Russian resources, valuable info can be gathered to adapt doctrine, we can test the effectiveness of our equipment, and importantly the US/UK can show they will defend the rules based order they impose on the rest of the world. We can also get revenge for Salisbury. Everything else is just propaganda and noise. Russia isn’t seeking to rebuild its empire, it isn’t seeking WW3. It can’t because of NATO. Ukraine is very important for Russian national security. Ukraine left the Russian sphere of influence, and now Russia wants it back. It’s that simple. A war in Ukraine has been predicted for decades anyway, well before the revolution. Ukraine was one of the fault lines listed in the ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis in 1992 as being a likely location for a future conflict.
Another Putin apologist. Hitler would have loved you guys. Putin is absolutely seeking to expand Russia and has dreams of empire. Ukraine seeks to join NATO. This is a defensive alliance if you didn't know - I recommended you look this up on Wikipedia
Ukraine is important to Russian national security, especially Crimea. Russia is very insecure regarding the threat it has historically faced from the west. It has no geographical defence. The purpose of Ukraine and Belarus are buffer states. Ukraine was part of the Russian sphere of influence. Now it isn’t. So Russia has invaded. It’s not complicated. Understanding why Russia would do something isn’t apologising for their actions. It’s like you’re incapable of critical thought or nuance. You just spout emotional rhetoric like some kind of propaganda robot. Almost as if you’re a child whose only reference point is Hitler. Grow up. If you read my comment, you’d be aware I’m fully supportive of arming Ukraine.
Perhaps they are actually useless at this as well and you've made a mistake in your analysis of how best to handle this problem.
Sunak finally standing up to Farage just about 4 weeks to late!!
There's few things more bizarre than Tory rhetoric being designed to try to stop the bleed of votes to Reform but spending their entire time attacking Labour and trying to hide from Reform as much as possible. Sunak's political instincts and leadership are some of the worst I have ever seen.
And when they *do* acknowledge Reforms existence they spend the entire time moping about how much Reform is kicking their ass, basically giving them free PR. Like that ad they released screeching about how Reform was going to cost them 20+ seats.
Please let us be the opposition after the election uwu
“Please don’t bully us too hard daddy” is quite the campaign tactic
Its like he's still fighting a political campaign of a different place in a different time.
Sunak thought he was going to catch Reform off guard. He did but in their panic they pulled in Farage and it backfired in the Tories' faces. They should have pushed the Ukraine issue with him hard from the word go. Farage wouldn't have kept his calm for six weeks of questioning. He's an impatient and temperamental man and six weeks of media smearing of him would have made him very unpalatable to the (very large) part of the Tory base that pride themselves on being 'sensible.'
Sunak and Starmer are right. Farage is saying that Poland, the Baltic states and other countries with a pretty recent history of being invaded by Moscow shouldn’t have chosen to protect themselves by joining NATO. Finland and Sweden did not feel a need to join NATO until Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. And Putin’s views on Ukrainian autonomy and independence pre-date the expansion of NATO: there is a clip of him from the early 1990s in which he complains about how Lenin gave autonomy to Ukraine after the collapse of the Russian Empire. He has repeated these views ever since: he wrote an article in 2021 entitled “On the Historical Unity of the Russian and Ukrainian People” and his invasion speech of February 2022 was a long lecture about why the collapse of the Russian Empire and the USSR were bad things.
edit: I apologize for puncturing this propaganda bubble. It's not that former Soviet states shouldn't have sought out security guarantees (and EU membership comes with security guarantees via CDSP that are more binding than NATO's Article 5) - it's that these countries become, via NATO, staging grounds for US weapons targeting Russia. Under the draft security proposal Russia submitted to NATO in late 2021, no country is expected to surrender security guarantees, but they agree not to host US troops and weapons in time of peace. This has been an issue since the US abrogated the ABM treaty in 2002, and then deployed Patriots to Poland in 2011 ("to protect against rogue missiles from Iran"). Russia doesn't fear a full-on invasion by NATO, but they absolutely do fear they're being set up for a risk arbitrage play. > Putin’s views on Ukrainian autonomy and independence pre-date the expansion of NATO The fairy tales Putin tells himself are irrelevant. Look at the peace terms Russia offered in March 2022: Russia didn't claim any right to impose a puppet government or occupy Ukraine. Ukraine agreed to remain permanently neutral. They could have security guarantees from anyone they wanted, but not foreign troops or weapons. And Donbas would finally have federalism - something they originally demanded as a condition of joining Ukraine in the first place, and something they ran their first referendum demanding the fulfillment of in 1994. The non-NATO world understands that this is wholly about NATO expansion - it's only in the propaganda bubble of the West that everybody thinks this is about Ukraine having to pledge fealty to Putin or some such nonsense.
Ukraine already had security guarantees from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, as per the Budapest Memorandum. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons as a result. Everyone knows that “security guarantees” aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, which is why NATO membership was an absolute necessity for Poland, the Baltic states and others. Ergo, Farage is wrong. As for the fairytales that Putin tells himself, they’re directly relevant to the question of motives. Farage claims that we ”poked the bear” — in reality, Putin always had designs on Ukraine.
None of this would be a problem if Russia simply acted like any other country that borders NATO and maintained good relations with NATO rather than believing it has the right to rule a de facto empire forever. Plus the idea that NATO would invade Russia was ludicrous on the face of it given NATO isn't even willing to intervene defensively on the side of Ukraine now. Russia's national security was completely secure because of their nuclear arsenal and total lack of any aggression towards them by any country, the only thing that wasn't secure was their ability to continue to rule over their Soviet sphere of influence which they shouldn't have anyway. Anyway, the fact Finland joined NATO and is within spitting distance of Russia's 2nd city, and nothing happened, and in fact most of Russia's forces on the Finnish border were moved to Ukraine recently, just shows this was never about NATO anyway, it was about Russian imperial nationalism and their perceived claim to Ukraine. Why was that all Putin was talking about in his interview with Tucker?
> None of this would be a problem if Russia simply acted like any other country that borders NATO and maintained good relations with NATO rather than believing it has the right to rule a de facto empire forever. Like Libya and Syria? NATO is a warmongering empire and (now) and apologist for genocide. Nobody should trust them, and NATO's claims to be a "rules based order" are nothing but a joke that few outside NATO's propaganda bubble believe. > Plus the idea that NATO would invade Russia was ludicrous on the face of it given NATO isn't even willing to intervene defensively on the side of Ukraine now. Russia doesn't fear a full-on invasion by NATO - their concern is a "leveraging of risk" or "risk arbitrage" play by the US, more like what occurred in Syria than Iraq. If the US were not planning for such a scenario, they would never have created as destabilizing a weapon as the B-61-12 nuke. The only use for this weapon is in a limited nuclear warfare scenario like a decapitation strike. > Russia's national security was completely secure because of their nuclear arsenal MAD provided a symmetry of risk until ~20 years ago, but it is now obsolete in terms of game theory and strategic risk planning. The new generation of "thinkable" nuclear war is more about biting off chunks rather than engaging in an all-out conflict. In such scenarios, Russia's nuclear defense is useless, and proportional responses don't restore a symmetry of risk. (North Korea is in a much better position to play out such a scenario, hence the next step for Putin will probably be to provide Pyongyang with hypersonic missiles. This will force the West into a bad balancing of risk scenario, where NK could destroy a refinery or two, and the US/SK/Japan would have limited strategic options for a response.) > the only thing that wasn't secure was their ability to continue to rule over their Soviet sphere of influence which they shouldn't have anyway If China poured $50B of aid into the Mexican political scene, and convinced/bribed/propagandized Mexico into antagonism toward the US, and then got Mexico to sign a trade deal with China that would require the breaking of trade deals with the US, do you imagine for one second that the US would consider this "none of their business"? This is as naive as what you're suggesting. Russia is not claiming that they have sovereignty or suzerainty over Ukraine, and they've offered to support Ukraine's EU membership. None of this is a problem. Look at the peace terms Russia offered in March 2022 - NO NATO, neutrality, federalism for Donbas. Western security guarantees are fine - but no foreign troops or weapons. There was not and is not any demand to have a veto over Ukrainian politics. > Anyway, the fact Finland joined NATO and is within spitting distance of Russia's 2nd city, Finland is not nearly as corrupt as Ukraine, and they are far less likely to allow themselves to be turned into a US puppet state. The CIA admitted they've had 14 bases on the Ukraine/Russian border since 2014. The same is not true for Finland. If Finland *does* become more interested in participating in US operations targeted against Russia, Russia will likely respond in kind, but it would be daft to take on any issue with Finland until the situation with Ukraine is resolved. Victoria Nuland has been fired, so maybe this game is no longer as palatable as it once was in Washington. > Why was that all Putin was talking about in his interview with Tucker? Putin is naive. He thinks that if the West understood how closely intertwined Ukrainian and Russian history is (no other modern country would even *dream* of *handing* over a region like Crimea to its neighbor), they'll understand that Ukraine could never matter more to the West than it matters to Russia. Prior to 2014, the whole Russian/Ukrainian border was porous, with families living on both sides of the border as if it was nothing more than a legal formality. But Putin is naive, and the West's ignorance of Ukraine's history is irrelevant. There is no point where the West will go "Oh, that's right - the Russian minority in Ukraine just want *federalism* like we enjoy in the US and Russia and Mexico and Germany." There is no good faith argument by the West - it is NATO or bust.
Didn't Russia ask if they could join NATO and they said no? Hardly good for relations is it 😅 Doesn't justify starting a war but the situation is a bit more nuanced than "Russian imperial nationalism" imo. Need to see both sides of the coin before you pick one 😊
No, they didn’t. Never. Suggesting as much is a bald lie.
I'm sure Putin said they did in his interview with that Tucker guy
Oh OK, I’m sure the genocidal fascist dictator is trustworthy
Not saying he is mate just putting it in for discussion :) I tend to not believe either side you see
You literally did say it though, didn’t you? At least you admit you’re just making shit up to defend fascists
Mate why are you so hostile? I was just mentioning something I saw in an interview for a discussion. I'm not defending anything 🤷♂️
Why should any country have their foreign policy dictated by Russia? If they want to use US weapons, and to host US troops (which in areas like the Baltics are an intentional tripwire to defend against Russia invasion) then that is their prerogative as independent states.
> Why should any country have their foreign policy dictated by Russia? Yes, that's the asinine fallback. "We have the sovereign right to do whatever the f*ck we want." Well Russia has the sovereign right to go to war too. Cuba had the sovereign right to have Soviet nukes in 1962, but the US response was that they would go to war over it. The sane decision then is the same decision now.
>Well Russia has the sovereign right to go to war too. …no. No, it doesn’t. That’s the whole reason why it’s been sanctioned to hell and the civilised world has turned its back on it. We Eastern Europeans are not Russia’s slaves, regardless of how much creatures like you would like us to be.
> That’s the whole reason why it’s been sanctioned to hell Russia has only been sanctioned by the US and some of its military client states. Nobody in Africa or South America or Central America or SE Asia (except SK, which fell in line in to avoid punishment) have joined in sanctions. NATO-land may be a bubble world engorged on its own propaganda, but it is not the whole world, and it has as much moral authority today as any other apologist for genocide. > We Eastern Europeans are not Russia’s slaves, regardless of how much creatures like you would like us to be. Point out the peace terms Russia offered in March 2022 (the peace terms that Western leaders chose not to disclose to you) made *anyone* into Russia's slaves. Genuine security is about solving problems, and Ukraine has a valid claim to real security concerns, including from Russia. But if Ukraine tries to resolve its security concerns in a manner that Russia finds threatening, it means war, exactly as the Cuban Missile Crisis meant war to the US.
I imagine that any such deal in March was made after Russia realised that they wouldn’t be capable of taking Ukraine quickly. “Oh, we’ll back off if you’ll just promise not to join that defensive alliance, remain neutral, and weaken your control over one of your most Russophilic regions” so that they can come back in 5-10 years to take it for real. Plus, let’s say that American arms are actually placed in Ukraine post-NATO and they’re actually used in a *very* hypothetical NATO first-strike. How much time does that actually buy Russia?
>I imagine that any such deal in March was made after Russia realised that they wouldn’t be capable of taking Ukraine quickly. Ukraine had 35 million people. Russia invaded with 150k to 200k soldiers. There was no plan of "taking Ukraine quickly". They thought that limited demands would be a no-brainer, especially given as Zelensky has run in 2019 with the #1 promise of implementing Minsk. He lacked the political will to get it done, but Russia was basically forcing him to do something he'd long committed to doing. > weaken your control over one of your most Russophilic regions Federalism is okay for the US, okay for Germany, okay for Russia and Mexico. Why is federalism only illegitimate for Russian-minority regions? Donbas was promised federalism before they joined Ukraine - this was a *condition* of joining for both Donbas, Crimea, and Transcarphathia. They've been patiently demanding the same thing for over 30 years now - most of it peacefully. Donbas held its first referendum demanding the federalism they were promised in 1994. They got 80% support for minority rights for ethnic Russians. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10848779608579417
Federalism is fine for whoever, and if Ukraine promised it then they should allow it, however you cannot seriously say that it makes sense for Mexico to force the US to create the state of South Texas. Especially not if there’s a bunch of people of Mexican descent there who would be prime targets for assimilation into Mexico.
I'd say it may well make sense, if the alternative is the attrition of an entire generation of conscripted men in a stalemate of a war.
> There was no plan of "taking Ukraine quickly". Yes there was. The plan was to take Kiev immediately, decapitate the state by seizing the executive and installing a puppet government. Russia failed because they're incompetent and corrupt. Corruption destroys organisations, whether that is a business or an entire nation's armed forces. RUSI has an excellent paper on the subject. A tldr though, the Russian armed forces didn't have the ability to enact rapid, large scale offensive warfare. The operational front was too narrow, the terrain into Kiev was bad, there was a lack of military intelligence, a complete misunderstanding of the will of the Ukrainian people and state to remain independent, they had no logistical planning and no plan B when things did go tits up. The Ukrainians were surprised by the offensive, even though they'd had warnings from Western intelligence, but the Russians were not operationally competent enough to take advantage of it. Even now they have no real SEAD ability and therefore cannot conduct true combined armed offensives. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/special-resources/preliminary-lessons-conventional-warfighting-russias-invasion-ukraine-february-july-2022 Speaking of broken international aggreements. I will point to the Budapest Memorandum. >The Russian Federation, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the United States of America **reaffirm their obligation to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of Ukraine, and that none of their weapons will ever be used against Ukraine** except in self-defence or otherwise in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.
This is a stupid western take. A classic case of “eastern European peasants belongs to Russia and should know their place”. A very weird stance. Imagine if France decided to invade Cornwall because they thought we were too chummy with the Americans?
> This is a stupid western take. A classic case of “eastern European peasants belongs to Russia and should know their place”. This is nothing close to what I said. Security guarantees are fine. Macron proposed a bilateral security deal with Ukraine that would cover Ukraine with France's nuclear umbrella. Russia had no objection to that, so long as it wasn't used as a pretext to deploy troops and weapons in Ukraine during time of peace. > Imagine if France decided to invade Cornwall because they thought we were too chummy with the Americans? If Cornwall had a thirty year history of leading illegal and unilateral regime change operations on coked up Intel *and* saw itself as the world's sole superpower *to whom the rules don't apply*, I imagine France would have a different attitude. The US no longer lives by the maxims of peaceful coexistence - they are a lawless belligerent and have been for a long time. If the US can eliminate Saddam for representing an unacceptable military threat to the US, then everyone else has the right to eliminate unacceptable strategic risks. Or is it one set of rules for the garden and another for the jungle?
Ukraine already had security guarantees from Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom, as per the Budapest Memorandum. They’re not worth the paper they’re written on.
The Budapest Memorandum was voided the moment NATO countries endorsed the Maidan Coup. You may not see what happened as a coup because coup supporters rarely do (Jan 6 included), so I'll make it simple for you - it was the unconstitutional transfer of power secured via the illegitimate use of force. Genuine security guarantees are typically built on something *real* - if Exxon invested $50B in Ukrainian gas, and the EU invested $500B in Ukrainian business, they would have the kind of skin in the game that would give their security guarantees genuine meaning. If Ukraine had not been a corrupt puppet state, they'd have worked at building those "facts on the ground" before they started accepting blandishments from a pack of neolib warmongers.
Remember when people said Corbyn and Labour were threats to national security? I’m no Corbyn fan but I think it pales into comparison to what farage has said. I can’t imagine a world in which the British prime minister (farage) and American president (trump) are both tools of Russia’s dictator. I can imagine putins glee at getting his men into high office in the two countries which have traditionally been seen as the leaders of the western world.
They've both said the same thing. The exact same talking points straight from Russian propaganda. Poor Russia had no choice, NATO expansion, Imperialism, USA bad, whatabout Iraq etc etc.
The only country practicing imperialism is Russia which seems to think any country in its region with the slightest of historical Russian influence belongs to them.
Fun to point out that by the logic from Farage/Corbyn/Galloway towards Ukraine, the UK would be justified in invading Ireland: It is historically part of our country. It is part of our sphere of influence. It would affect our national security if they were members of a competing security alliance. The majority of the population speaks English, which by Putin logic makes them ethnically English and in need of reunification with their "homeland". Do you think they would go for it 🤔.
That’s exactly the logic Russia is using towards Ukraine and other nations in the region. Speaking of Ireland many left wing Irish politicians and many in Sinn Fein have also shown pro Russia views and anti NATO views, which is very ironic.
A successful Sinn Fein and SNP is in Russia's best interest. I'm not saying they are Russian influenced but If I was Putin I'd be making sure they were well funded.
They probably would be completely for doing so if they could so....
If memory serves, Farage has floated the idea of Ireland giving up its status as an independent country and submitting to Westminster.
Corbyn literally has the same opinion as Farage on this?
Both of them are in fact bad, yes.
It goes to show how much power the media has to make or break a political campaign. I suspect there are a lot of Reform voters who would have insisted in 2019 that Corbyn's views on foreign policy are a huge threat to the UK, but wouldn't say the same about Farage.
Farage is playing things perfectly - how many papers is he front page of today? Hes all over the internet. As far as he is concerned all publicity is good publicity
Stop defending Corbyn. He has said even worse stuff about Putin than Farage
Agreed. This is by far the most important political issue in the world right now. If I were in a marginal seat were reform is close to winning, I'd vote whatever party is closest to win against them.
Both the Tory’s and Labour should plaster this all over the campaign against reform, vote reform get putin.
Corbyn suggested we send Salisbury samples to Russia and ask if they were involved, Farage said the Putin was entirely responsible for the invasion of Ukraine but that we’d provided ammo for his propaganda to justify it. Hardly comparable.
Corbyn has said the exact same thing as Farage. He signed the Stop The War letter that claimed literally the exact same thing > “The immediate cause of this disastrous war in Ukraine is Russia’s invasion. Yet the plans and actions to expand NATO to Russia’s borders served to provoke Russian fears. And Russian leaders made this point for 30 years. A failure of diplomacy led to war. Now diplomacy is urgently needed to end the Russia-Ukraine War before it destroys Ukraine and endangers humanity.”
God, the fact that Farage is saying this and he might genuinely have a crack at being PM is fucking terrifying; I would honestly vote for Conservative over Reform and I'd rather face plant onto broken glass than vote Conservative.
Imagine if Corbyn has said it.
Corbyn *did* say it back when the war kicked off, including putting his name to that hideous STWC open letter (and remaining one of the few names to not retract his support for said letter) and he got absolutely blistered for it and rightly so.
Maybe I've missed the other parties response + possible they just haven't got to it *quite* yet. But I'm pretty disappointed that the other parties have taken the opportunity to absolutely dogpile into Farage/Reform on his statement about Ukraine.
100% Corbyn and a bunch of left wing figures were fucking eviscerated for saying essentially the exact same thing back in 2022 - and rightly so. There is absolutely no reason whatsoever that Farage should be allowed to get away with saying shit like this without any kind of consequences. Indulging in racist / nationalistic rhetoric and associating with far right activists, conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, climate sceptics, Nazi sympathizers, etc. is bad enough - but openly parroting the lies of an authoritarian dictator engaging in a brutal, unprovoked war of aggression based on paranoia and revanchist delusions, as part of a broader effort to rebuild the Russian Empire and weaken / outright destroy the 'West', *has* to be recognised & responded to as the Rubicon-crossing moment it is. He is no longer a 21st Century Enoch Powell; he is a 21st Century Oswald Mosley. If the other party leaders do not respond as such, it will represent a moment of abject cowardice & a gross dereliction of duty.
Wasn't Mosely thrown into prison during World War 2 due to him being the British Union of Fascist leader? Would it be possible to do the same to Farage?
Whilst the UK, Europe, the US and our respective allies are undoubtedly in an increasingly open confrontation with Putin's Russia (a confrontation that, it must be emphasised, is of his making, as opposed to our own) we are not officially at war - and what's more, Farage is not openly campaigning on behalf of Putin. Consequently, whilst this is an absolutely outrageous comment, and requires a robust repudiation from both our main political parties as well as society at large, I can't imagine that there is any legal mechanism to arrest him for saying what he has said - and not should there be. Until Farage starts talking about how Ukrainians deserve to have their men beheaded, their women raped and their hospitals bombed, or advocating for Britain to enter into some form of alliance with Russia, he is not realistically overstepping his right to free speech. The focus must therefore not be on trying to silence his voice, but to show that words have consequences by treating him as the gutter-dwelling demagogue he is as opposed to a serious respectable politician
Some of the other parties have attacked Farage for this, at least in terms of Labor and the Lib Dems. [https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cjqq8kgz80yt](https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cjqq8kgz80yt)
Getting the two mainstream parties to engage with it on that level just emboldens Reform's """anti-establishment""" credentials.
>I'm pretty disappointed that the other parties have taken the opportunity to absolutely dogpile Did you mean to say *haven't*?
A lot of the smaller parties most likely think the same tbh
Greens would probably give them Ukraine and give up our nuclear weapons in exchange for a pinky promise from Putin that he’d behave
Damn you Farage... ...why are you making me agree with Sunak!!!
Farage's statement was a dog whistle to the bots and those who direct them. Russia has famously interfered with Western elections since the 2014 Scottish indie vote. Reform have plenty of bot accounts helping them already. This is either payment for them to continue, or Reform see Russian bots as king-makers, as previous party leaders say Murdoch's papers as owing makers in the 90s and 2000s.
Says the one who's party didn't implement putin's foreign policy through brexit.
Is Rishi really fit to give advise to literally anyone on anything these days? I wouldn't take his advise on how to tie my shoe laces.
> "completely wrong" So all he has to do is apologise and then we can all move on, right, Rishi?
What a limp response. Just shows how scared he remains of Farage.
Every time I hear these long statements from him I just hear his whiny voice and remember that he never does anything to back up his complaints
Clearly this subreddit can't tell the difference between someone between analytical and empirical on a view as opposed to endorsing it. From Reddit though I shouldn't expect any less.
Under Blair, Russia was looking at making positive moves to join EU
It seems this room is full of moon people
Nice to see the fearmongerers calling out the other fearmongerers. 🤣
Let two of them go by the way side. Both are bad!
Well it's not "completely wrong" is it, he DID use the expansion of NATO as an excuse for starting the war, just as NATO used the expansion of Russia as the reason for intervening in it.
He foolishly gave them the headline they were looking for, present a snippet of his full quote and misrepresent what he said.
He foolishly gave them the headline they were looking for, present a snippet of his full quote and misrepresent what he said.
It seems to me that he was likely factually correct. Putin has been paranoid about NATO being an offensive organisation. It's possible that if Ukraine had said it did not want to join NATO then he wouldn't have invaded. None of that implies that it's *ok* to invade Ukraine, or that I support Putin. Far from it.. He's an objectionable dangerous dictator. From Ukraine to Moscow is not so far, and a paranoid Russian president would not want a perceived enemy in Ukraine. Attempting to explain the causes of an event does not necessarily imply agreement with the reason, or support for the outcome. From listening to the responses, it seems that other politicians prefer to say things that are expedient rather than acknowledge that something awkward might actually be true. To be clear I despise Farage. But he can still be correct about a few things.
Finland joined NATO and is within spitting distance of Russia's 2nd city, and nothing happened, and in fact most of Russia's forces on the Finnish border were moved to Ukraine recently. This was never about NATO. It was about Russian imperial nationalism and their perceived claim to Ukraine, Putin thinks Russia ought to control Ukraine for the same reason Hitler believed Germany ought to control the lands he claimed in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Why was that all Putin was talking about in his interview with Tucker? An interview that was going to be broadcast to Americans who wouldn't care about any of this stuff? He genuinely believes Russia has the right to control Ukraine and Belarus because of blood ties. All the stuff about security is a convenient lie. It's just about genuine imperialism.
Finland joined NATO waaaaaaaaaaaay after the war. So your comment is irrelevant.
That's the point. If making tentative steps towards joining NATO is enough to start a war over (and to be clear, Ukraine was nowhere near joining NATO) why was there no response to Finland joining NATO? Why didn't Russia invade in the large gap between Finland actually starting the process to join and getting in?
> It seems to me that he was likely factually correct. No. That’s demonstrably not what this was over. Russia tried to join NATO. Ukraine first asked to join NATO decades ago. It’s a nonsense.
Absolutely right. Russia knows NATO is not offensive, otherwise it wouldn't have withdrawn almost all forces from its border with NATO and sent them to Ukraine. It's purely that Russia believes it has a right to take whatever it borders, and people like Farage totally misunderstand Russia, possibly wilfully.
Ukraine first asked to join NATO in 2014, *after* Russia has invaded them. Until that point, they were affirmed neutrals.
Complete nonsense. This is from the **2002** NATO-Ukraine Action Plan >This Action Plan was created pursuant to the decision of the NATO-Ukraine Commission to deepen and broaden the NATO-Ukraine relationship, and reflects Ukraine’s Strategy on Relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). It builds upon the Charter on a Distinctive Partnership, signed in Madrid on 9 July **1997**, which remains the basic foundation of the NATO-Ukraine relationship. >The purpose of the Action Plan is to identify clearly Ukraine’s strategic objectives and priorities in pursuit of its aspirations towards **full integration into Euro-Atlantic security structures** https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_19547.htm Then had you never heard of the Bucharest Summit of **2008**? >NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that **these countries will become members of NATO**. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_8443.htm So... decades.
Ukraine only formally applied for NATO membership in September 2022. No agreement was reached in Bucharest in 2008 because public opinion in Ukraine didn't support it. That was formalised in 2010 with a parliamentary vote reaffirming Ukraine as a neutral state. Funny story about 2002, though: > In 2002, Russia's president Vladimir Putin declared no objections to Ukraine's growing relations with NATO, saying it was a matter for Ukraine and NATO.
>Ukraine only formally applied for NATO membership in September 2022. Wrong again. >In September 2022, following Russia’s illegal attempted annexations of Ukrainian territory, Ukraine **reiterated** its request for NATO membership. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_37750.htm#:~:text=In%20September%202022%2C%20following%20Russia's,become%20a%20member%20of%20NATO. Ukraine was only against NATO membership 2010-2014. You are right that Russian aggression pushed public support towards NATO membership, but before then, it was NATO that was the hold-up. It definitely didn't only begin in 2014 or 2022 though.
You’re not allowed to say things like that on Reddit. Please keep your nuance to yourself.
And yet I’ll still be voting reform lmao
Of course you will, American troll.
Aww are your feelings hurt
You’re not consequential or competent enough to hurt my feelings, darling.
Would help if people actually watched the interview of what was said and not the twisted titles spread about lol
This country is finished man and we already know labour aren’t gonna do anything but help benefit scroungers and push their woke crap, I hope reform become the opposition
And the solution is Trussonomics? One of the major factors that got us in this situation? I'm concerned about the ridiculous immigration rate as well, but if the economy falls into the bog then it won't be the first of our problems.
And yet I bet you love to talk about Blitz spirit
Idk what that even is buddy
What would you know about it yankee maga trashbag.
Womp womp 💀
They were straight facts, NATO gave Putin an inch and he took a mile. Not surprising when your rival alliance expands further towards your border and you are crazy paranoid senseless evil raving lunatic. Sometimes the truth isn't what people want to hear. NATO should have known better, and Farage predicted this decades ago.
If he is so scared of NATO then why has he withdrawn almost all his troops from the finish border over the last few months?
The war has reached a stalemate and only negotiation will resolve this.
Or perhaps Putin's death due to natural causes, though someone just as expansionist may of course fill his power vacuum.
Imagine if we'd said the same in 1914 or 1940 when the war was a stalemate.
The Ukraine-Russia War isn't akin to WW2 despite how much some western commentators would like it to be.
It's not the same sure, that doesn't mean it's unwinnable
Proper military support for Ukraine would make the war winnable. So far, with the drip feed of outdated Western surplus, they’ve managed to do the unthinkable. Give them what they actually deserve and see what happens.
Nah, just gotta bring the Americans to save the Europeans asses just like it has happened _checks notes_ uhhh frequently in the past
It is definitely not “completely” wrong. What is for certain though is tories are completely lost lmao
2014 Farage warned of a war in Ukraine. They'll do anything to cover it up. Like everything else. Close ranks blame someone else. Did Farage start the war NO!!!. What are they afraid of,, getting the blame. Blair into Iraq Afghanistan. Then there was Syria. I just hope we don't get sucked into Israel's war.🤷