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 reds8n wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32283456


note :

Mr Zotov's English is near perfect - polished at international conventions of the table top fantasy war game, War Hammer, through interaction with other fans.

So your parents were right : Nothing good will come of all this toy soldier nonsense !

I always knew Warhammer would lead to WWIII....

Sounds like things are about to kick off again soon.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32425602

A bit of a necro, but something relevant (sort of) just happened.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32913929

Seems ol' Vladimir wised up, and declared troop deaths even during peacetime a state secret.

Wouldn't there have to be troop deaths in the first place for them to be secret?

Guy takes a bullet in trials - State Secret. Guy is hit by a truck when crossing the road on leave - State Secret...

Aye the regular forums that I check out on this subject have been becoming quieter of late. The Russians have what bits of the country they want so have been winding down their involvement and just letting the separatists do their thing (still supplying arms and gear that is, but the number of troops in the region has been going down).

The media's moved onto some other story, probably some royal birthday party or something. Wars drag on and in the case where people aren't even calling it a proper war, and talk in double speak the whole time, that makes reporting the matter a little taboo. Whatever happened to that counter-Russian propaganda initiative the West was coming up with?

 Wyrmalla wrote:
Guy takes a bullet in trials - State Secret. Guy is hit by a truck when crossing the road on leave - State Secret...

Aye the regular forums that I check out on this subject have been becoming quieter of late. The Russians have what bits of the country they want so have been winding down their involvement and just letting the separatists do their thing (still supplying arms and gear that is, but the number of troops in the region has been going down).

The media's moved onto some other story, probably some royal birthday party or something. Wars drag on and in the case where people aren't even calling it a proper war, and talk in double speak the whole time, that makes reporting the matter a little taboo. Whatever happened to that counter-Russian propaganda initiative the West was coming up with?

They found better things to waste their money.

We finally go entirely pay? I'm logged in, but I'm seeing forum ads among the posts in the forum!

 BaronIveagh wrote:
We finally go entirely pay? I'm logged in, but I'm seeing forum ads among the posts in the forum!

I'm seeing it as well as a DCM; I think it's just for the last little bit of the Maelstrom's Edge Kickstarter.

 Kanluwen wrote:

 BaronIveagh wrote:
We finally go entirely pay? I'm logged in, but I'm seeing forum ads among the posts in the forum!

I'm seeing it as well as a DCM; I think it's just for the last little bit of the Maelstrom's Edge Kickstarter.

You can actually close the banner, in the upper left hand corner. It's hidden, so "mouse over" it.

 whembly wrote:

 Kanluwen wrote:

 BaronIveagh wrote:
We finally go entirely pay? I'm logged in, but I'm seeing forum ads among the posts in the forum!

I'm seeing it as well as a DCM; I think it's just for the last little bit of the Maelstrom's Edge Kickstarter.

You can actually close the banner, in the upper left hand corner. It's hidden, so "mouse over" it.

Duh?

However it still leaves a spot at the bottom, stating the text underneath of the word "old".

Wow, the Ukraine thread is back? I feel at home again
I completely forgot where we left off at discussion though.

In any case, things are still relatively quiet over there. No more large scale fighting.

 Kanluwen wrote:

Duh?

However it still leaves a spot at the bottom, stating the text underneath of the word "old".

Some of the ads don't seem to have it, either. Also, the text prompt to close it does not seem to work either.

Any reason why this thread's became a discussion about ads (which there's already a thread about in Nuts & Bolts) instead of the topic?

Presumably, because the topic just isn't that interesting anymore.

Call us when there's a real war going on.

As for Russia: I've been in a heated argument with a friend of mine, of whom is a photographer in Russia. It appears that a sizeable portion of Russian citizens are unaware of or refuse to acknowledge their government's involvement in Ukraine. The guy I talked to even when so far as to say America wants to bait the Russian Federation into a war over Ukraine so the US can invade Russia and take their resources? I'm not sure if he's a crackpot or if this is something that's been propagated by their media. When I pointed out that the US has no interest in hard-to-access siberian crude and in fact the Ruskies were eying Kazakhstan for THEIR available resources, he just laughed.

Beyond that, anything related to Russian involvement in Ukraine is rejected out of hand despite numerous first hand accounts, pictures, satellite photos, rebel testimonies, etc.

I'd really like to hear Iron Captain's input on this, this is quite crazy. Then again, I'm not surprised -- it's like the Iron Curtain all over again.

The government has strict control over what the public is exposed to.

They are making the public more and more anti-west. It will end up with us all being hated in a few generations.


Also Putin has made reporting numbers of Russian soldiers deaths in "special operations" required to be a state secret.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/28/vladimir-putin-declares-all-russian-military-deaths-state-secrets


They don't even tell the soldiers families by the sound of it.

You can live in a fantasy world and not even know it it would seem, or at least you can be willfully ignorant that there's any other reality but your own.

Aye though, if things go this way then who's expecting Russians to come out some post Putin haze in the next couple of decades like they did with Communism? To find out that the rest of the world's not quite as they were told and well ...that isn't OK. Que North Korea situation in 5, 4, 3... Seriously I can just see the anti-West parades in Red Square now.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33009049

Another person opposing Putin mysteriously falls ill.

 Howard A Treesong wrote:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33009049

Another person opposing Putin mysteriously falls ill.

Putin just has like.......the best luck ever.

Considering the United States can see to it's domestic needs and still export oil at this point... yeah no, I don't think we're secretly after Siberia. The PRC on the other hand might decide to go after it again, but they're playing buddy-buddy right now as they ramp up gamesmanship against the U.S. in the Pacific. Russia being around is convenient for them at the moment.

China is really the power that Russians should be worried about far more than the US. The myth of the West lusting over Siberian resources is just that, a myth. Too many logistical issues, US oil & gas production is booming, and we can get most of the other resources from 3rd world nations. China however, shares a very long border, has much easier potential force projection, has a much more direct need of such resources, and is basically playing Loan Shark to the Russian Federation currently

I mean, if the US is going to lust after resources Russia claims, it's going to be in the arctic, not Siberia.

So, ah, the plot of the sci-fi novel Germline then?

The US, Russia and a few other countries go up against China after the Chinese make their moves on the Russian oil fields. The US and Russia of course both hating each other as they saw one another as natural enemies beforehand, as did their people with all the propaganda, till the real enemy came in the back door. Maybe letting the Chinese take over the Pacific whilst the rest of the world fought a Cold War against each other probably wasn't the best idea. Oh well, after China's glassed the US and Russia go have a real war with each other over the resources of Kazakhstan and the other countries in that region, as China showing its hand pushes the rest of the world to want the exact same thing (the plot of that particular book, not so much the rest of the series, centering over the militarizing of the resource mining industry).

...I'd note that that series was written by a Whitehouse military analyst IIRC. Though it is a sci-fi series, the commentary on "what-if" situations is pretty good actually.

And a derailing the thread I go. =P

 BlaxicanX wrote:
Presumably, because the topic just isn't that interesting anymore.

Call us when there's a real war going on.

That is quite offensive you know?
People are dying over there every day still.
Just this morning there was an attack on Shirokino:


Just a few days ago, 20 people died when Donetsk was shelled again:


Just because Western attention has moved on to new interests doesn't mean the war suddenly stopped.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 The Airman wrote:
As for Russia: I've been in a heated argument with a friend of mine, of whom is a photographer in Russia. It appears that a sizeable portion of Russian citizens are unaware of or refuse to acknowledge their government's involvement in Ukraine. The guy I talked to even when so far as to say America wants to bait the Russian Federation into a war over Ukraine so the US can invade Russia and take their resources? I'm not sure if he's a crackpot or if this is something that's been propagated by their media. When I pointed out that the US has no interest in hard-to-access siberian crude and in fact the Ruskies were eying Kazakhstan for THEIR available resources, he just laughed.

Beyond that, anything related to Russian involvement in Ukraine is rejected out of hand despite numerous first hand accounts, pictures, satellite photos, rebel testimonies, etc.

I'd really like to hear Iron Captain's input on this, this is quite crazy. Then again, I'm not surprised -- it's like the Iron Curtain all over again.

But Russia is not involved at all in Ukraine, at least not officially.
Certainly Russia has sent advisors and special forces to secretly help out the rebels, but the idea that Russia has entire divisions fighting in Ukraine is really ridiculous.

The idea that the US wants to destroy Russia is one that you will find is held by most Russians. I blame it on almost a century of communist ideology, where in Soviet propaganda 'capitalist' came to equal 'USA'. But when you think about it, the idea that the West wants to destroy Russia is actually already hundreds of years old, originating with the Great Schism. Russia and the West have a very complicated relationship, I reccommend this book if you want to know more about it: http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/international-relations-and-international-organisations/russia-and-west-alexander-putin-honor-international-relations
The US also does not help this by being probably the most russophobic place on earth short of of Lvov and its incredibly agressive foreign policy, regime change operations, invasions and its continuing encirclement of Russia. For all that claiming that you guys don't want to attack Russia, you are damn well making it look so.

Now it the US were to stop acting like the American Empire, maybe then their message of peace would be taken more seriously by the Russians. Only when the US stops threatening Russia and infringing on its traditional territory can there be a change for better relations.

That aside, Russia wants to take over Kazakhstan for its resources as much as the US wants to take Siberia. Russia has an abundance of resources already, and most of Kazakhstan is just steppe and desert. It does have resources, but no infrastructure to make use of it. Also, Kazakhstan and Russia have very good relations, so it is unlikely they will ever go to war. Especially because Kazakhstan is dependent on Russia for a lot of things.

 Vaktathi wrote:
China is really the power that Russians should be worried about far more than the US. The myth of the West lusting over Siberian resources is just that, a myth. Too many logistical issues, US oil & gas production is booming, and we can get most of the other resources from 3rd world nations. China however, shares a very long border, has much easier potential force projection, has a much more direct need of such resources, and is basically playing Loan Shark to the Russian Federation currently

I mean, if the US is going to lust after resources Russia claims, it's going to be in the arctic, not Siberia.

Russia's relation with China is also pretty complicated. One one side, China really wants an alliance and cooperation with Russia so they can get access to Siberian resources and Russia wants to ally with China to have the power to stand up to the West. This has resulted in the SCO. On the other side however, is the fact that China has become much more economically powerful than Russia since the '90s. Therefore, in any alliance Russia will actually be the junior partner to China. This is of course utterly unacceptable to Russia, an insult to Russian honour and imperial tradition. Therefore Putin has been pretty reluctant in going ahead with alliances like the SCO. It is a difficult dilemma. On one hand is an alliance with China neccessary if Russia wants to maintain its great power status, but on the other hand would an alliance with China actually diminish this great power status.
In any case, China is no military threat to Russia, there is no need for China to be agressive towards Russia. Why would it go through an incredibly destructive war to obtain resources that it could also obtain by economic infiltration and other peaceful means much more profitable than war?

Iron... we don't want anything from Russia.

It's all about geo-politics. Who can influence whom.

I would suggest the reason the Chinese aren't being aggressive is because the Russians aren't a threat to China. The division level border skirmishes between the PLA and Soviet Army back in the day just can't happen anymore. The Russian army simply can't muster and move the troops to the East that quickly and China has, at the very least, limited MAD with Russia. The Chinese are getting what they need via peaceful means at present, so they feel no need or desire to rock the boat, especially because Russia is distracting and/or annoying the United States, so it's beneficial to China to keep the paper bear off to the side roaring, supporting their efforts as needed. If Putin or a future Russian leader plays hard ball, or China gets more resource hungry, that could easily change in a day.

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Russia's relation with China is also pretty complicated. One one side, China really wants an alliance and cooperation with Russia so they can get access to Siberian resources and Russia wants to ally with China to have the power to stand up to the West. This has resulted in the SCO. On the other side however, is the fact that China has become much more economically powerful than Russia since the '90s. Therefore, in any alliance Russia will actually be the junior partner to China. This is of course utterly unacceptable to Russia, an insult to Russian honour and imperial tradition. Therefore Putin has been pretty reluctant in going ahead with alliances like the SCO. It is a difficult dilemma. On one hand is an alliance with China neccessary if Russia wants to maintain its great power status, but on the other hand would an alliance with China actually diminish this great power status.
In any case, China is no military threat to Russia, there is no need for China to be agressive towards Russia. Why would it go through an incredibly destructive war to obtain resources that it could also obtain by economic infiltration and other peaceful means much more profitable than war?

They likely would not, just as the US would not likely go to war with Russia over resources in the Arctic, it's just a much more plausible potential future threat, not that it's necessarily a particularly likely one, as all three powers in question possessing significant nuclear weapons stockpiles and nobody wants to deal with that.

As you noted, it's the economic imbalance that's going to realistically be the bigger issue, with Russia having 1/10th the population of China and 1/4th the GDP and that gap only likely to grow even more over time, and the Chinese have been taking advantage of that power in recent economic deals to their advantage.

The nightmare scenario for Russia is then a Europe that is aliented and no longer dependent on Russian energy products, and deep economic reliance on the much more centralized and coordinated (and thus better able to leverage its economic power than the various "federated" EU nations) China in an increasingly one-sided balance and the Chinese gaining significant, possibly controlling, stakes in Russian energy industries and Siberian resources. Will this happen? Who knows. But something like that is far more likely than US/EU interests lusting after Siberia.

The Chinese are very good playing the long game, and are perfectly fine with waiting years or decades to accomplish their goals, at least relative to Western powers who lose interest or get distracted far more quickly. They're very content for Russian military assets to be focused thousands of miles away and Russian social animosity pointed elsewhere while the Russian economy is forced to look for new investors and markets to sustain itself. The big winners of the Ukraine crisis is China.

As a bit of a random side-note, I noticed that Russia isn't going to be present at this year's UK Fairford Airshow. That in itself isn't surprising, but what's more interesting is that they haven't actually been invited.

Especially when you look at some of the countries that have been invited.

http://www.airtattoo.com/airshow/visiting/aircraft/latest-updates

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Iron_Captain wrote:
Russia's relation with China is also pretty complicated. One one side, China really wants an alliance and cooperation with Russia so they can get access to Siberian resources and Russia wants to ally with China to have the power to stand up to the West. This has resulted in the SCO. On the other side however, is the fact that China has become much more economically powerful than Russia since the '90s. Therefore, in any alliance Russia will actually be the junior partner to China. This is of course utterly unacceptable to Russia, an insult to Russian honour and imperial tradition. Therefore Putin has been pretty reluctant in going ahead with alliances like the SCO. It is a difficult dilemma. On one hand is an alliance with China neccessary if Russia wants to maintain its great power status, but on the other hand would an alliance with China actually diminish this great power status.
In any case, China is no military threat to Russia, there is no need for China to be agressive towards Russia. Why would it go through an incredibly destructive war to obtain resources that it could also obtain by economic infiltration and other peaceful means much more profitable than war?

They likely would not, just as the US would not likely go to war with Russia over resources in the Arctic, it's just a much more plausible potential future threat, not that it's necessarily a particularly likely one, as all three powers in question possessing significant nuclear weapons stockpiles and nobody wants to deal with that.

As you noted, it's the economic imbalance that's going to realistically be the bigger issue, with Russia having 1/10th the population of China and 1/4th the GDP and that gap only likely to grow even more over time, and the Chinese have been taking advantage of that power in recent economic deals to their advantage.

The nightmare scenario for Russia is then a Europe that is aliented and no longer dependent on Russian energy products, and deep economic reliance on the much more centralized and coordinated (and thus better able to leverage its economic power than the various "federated" EU nations) China in an increasingly one-sided balance and the Chinese gaining significant, possibly controlling, stakes in Russian energy industries and Siberian resources. Will this happen? Who knows. But something like that is far more likely than US/EU interests lusting after Siberia.

The Chinese are very good playing the long game, and are perfectly fine with waiting years or decades to accomplish their goals, at least relative to Western powers who lose interest or get distracted far more quickly. They're very content for Russian military assets to be focused thousands of miles away and Russian social animosity pointed elsewhere while the Russian economy is forced to look for new investors and markets to sustain itself. The big winners of the Ukraine crisis is China.

Your post gave Putin nightmares.
China is the laughing third here. It is now able to expand its influence over Russia greatly, while NATO gets distracted. As the Slovenes say: Kjer se prepirata dva, tretji dobiček ima. Where two fight, the third profits.

 Pacific wrote:
As a bit of a random side-note, I noticed that Russia isn't going to be present at this year's UK Fairford Airshow. That in itself isn't surprising, but what's more interesting is that they haven't actually been invited.

Especially when you look at some of the countries that have been invited.

http://www.airtattoo.com/airshow/visiting/aircraft/latest-updates

Russia doesn't need liberast airshows. Russia gives live shows with its bombers every month.

And seeing as this is still a thing, a touch of the human side of the conflict.

Edit: Spoilered for content - the guy's hand is a bit torn up


* Captures tank crewman.
"You're Russian?",
"No Ukrainian, I was a mine worker, I'm here for my starving family".
"He's a Separatist? Then why are we trying to help him, let him die in the mud".

Should warn that the video above is a little graphic.

I'm not sure if realising film of prisoners is legal or not either under the Geneva convention

The first article that appears when searching "geneva convention filming prisoners" says that it is legal. Or rather it doesn't mention it so its by default legal. Cue images of all the captured Ukrainian soldiers from the start of the war. =P