One should not forget to have a look at Olaf Scholz' past, as well as Merkel's.
Before 1989.

Meanwhile Georgia's Breakaway Region Ditches Referendum on Joining Russia:

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2022/...-russia-a77843

Orsted and Shell will not get gas from Gazprom anymore. From tomorrow on.


And while life gets more difficult for EU customers' economies and citizens, Russia signs a 290 bn dollar deal with China, Serbia boasts with having gotten an "extremely cheap" gas deal, and India and Pakistan signal their willigness to massively boost their relations with Russia regardign energy.

Germany will supply Greece with infantry fighting vehicles. This will allow Greece to supply Soviet era equipment to Ukraine.

Shell and Denmark's Ørsted will also not receive Russian gas from tomorrow. Both companies refuse to pay their bills to Gazprom in rubles. In the case of Shell, this concerns 1.2 billion cubic meters of gas per year that would be delivered to customers in Germany, Gazprom reports. At Ørsted it is about 1.9 billion cubic meters of gas per year, about 80 percent of all imports into Denmark.

In a response, Shell let it be known that it would continue to supply gas from other sources to its European customers. The company was already scaling back its purchases of Russian oil and gas and will continue to do so. Ørsted already saw the picture yesterday, when the Dutch gas trader GasTerra announced that Gazprom would turn off the gas tap.

Air Serbia's Airbus A320 cannot fly out of Moscow airport. It needs one of its details to be replaced. But Moscow airport has no more Airbus spare parts, because Airbus earlier suspended supplying its parts to Russia. :)

Ah wait, thats what the German Polish deal also was about. ;)

It was very - one-sided... :D

Olaf playing his silly games again.

hard to see what the western strategy is at this point. None of their assumptions seem to have worked out:

1. Russia's economy did not collapse due to sanctions;
2. Putin has not been overthrown;
3. The Russian army did not collapse;

In fact, the Russians are slowly grinding forward gaining territory every day.

Hard to see how the Ukrainians achieve victory.

The only realistic outcome at this point as far as I can see is a negotiated ceasefire where the Ukrainians will have to trade land for peace.

Of course that will only happen once the US stops propping up the UKR govt and pushes for a settlement. I wonder how many more billions of dollars uncle Joe is willing to pour into this. We are at what $ 54 billions and counting?

With the Russian army making some gains in the east in recent weeks, albeit incremental ones, commentators are asking whether — or even claiming — President Putin’s forces have changed the course of the war and are now on track to “win”.

Victory in this war is always going to be hard to establish because, whatever happens, it will have to end in a negotiated peace of some sort. It has become apparent in the past three months that Russia cannot hope to conquer all of Ukraine. And, as Ukraine cannot conquer Russia, a settlement between the two sides is the only option. This needs to be emphasised because it points to one reality: Ukraine has already won in one key respect. It will survive as an independent state, with the vast majority of its territory, a strong and reinforced national identity and, it should be hoped, eventual membership of the European Union. If this had been a result offered on February 24, it would have been seen as a convincing triumph for Ukraine.

We are therefore left to discuss whether Russia can achieve some goals from a war that Putin has already lost. And those goals are generally regarded as the Russian annexation of about 20 per cent of Ukraine’s territory, the large hook-shaped swath of land they now occupy from just below Kharkiv, down to Mariupol and over to Kherson. This is a more difficult victory to judge, because such an annexation will only result after a long, bloody war that will last many more months and possibly years.

Unless the Ukrainian government decides in the short term to throw away this part of the country to get a peace deal, the war will go on. The big question will be not what Russia holds today, but what it can hold in the future — and they may discover that holding is not as easy as taking. What the Russians are doing now is devoting a massive amount of their available military resources to take a very small area. They may take it (or they may not) but at the end of the day they have already suffered huge losses.

The Ukrainians, meanwhile, have undoubtedly suffered as well, but are in the process of being reinforced by better, often Nato-standard equipment than they had on February 24. In a few weeks they will be considerably more effective, particularly in ranged weaponry, than they were when the war started, while the Russian army, which is already starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel by deploying 50-year-old tanks and armored personnel carriers to Ukraine, will be weaker. Maybe the Russians can hold all that territory against Ukrainian attacks — but, more than likely, they will have real struggles trying to control a large, unwieldy piece of territory with what is now a shrinking military force.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/w...ssia-gjf7gzj3f

Grinding forward, gaining territory at a huge cost of life and material Russian army is not collapsed, but they are in a very bad state not able to keep up this offensive for a long time as Putin does not dare to declare mobilization because it will cause too many internal problems his army is dying unable to control occupied ground in the future.

Those sanctions will have effect in the long time, not in short time and Russian people can survive long time this kinda situations they are used to them. Killing Putin has no use, the authorial kleptocratic system must change, else it is only change of the one dictator for another. Ukrainians achieved victory they have the support of the west that Putin wanted to crush they still have the large size of their country under their control they likely become part of EU Putin invasion has slingshotted Ukraine into arms of the west in 3 days ;) he totally failed the loser

Alexey Navalny:
Well, what do I know? Maybe Putin doesn't hate me, maybe he secretly adores me. That's why he wants me to be hidden in an underground bunker, guarded by reliable people, just like himself. How else can I explain the fact that not even eight days have passed since my 9-year high-security sentence came into force, and today the investigator showed up again and formally charged me with a new case. It turns out that I created an extremist group in order to incite hatred towards officials and oligarchs. And when they put me in jail, I dared to be disgruntled about it (silly me) and called for rallies. For that, they're supposed to add up to 15 more years to my sentence. See, that's another 15 years in a secure stable bunker where I will be sheltered from the surprises and hardships of this "freedom" of yours. Where it's such a mess that the streets are even walked on by ordinary people - not FSO and FSIN officers. My parents came here for a visit, and they live in a small military town. So, of course, we joked that when Putin does start a nuclear war, they will get one of the first missiles. And I'm having the time of my life - who's going to bomb a prison in the middle of a swamp? So when the concrete starts melting out there, I will simply watch a particularly beautiful sunset from the prison yard. Thank Putin for that.

This is one man Putin fears in the meantime resistance is growing the mothers of the KIA Russian soldiers that are vocal against him and the much arson attacks on recruitment offices tells ordinary Russians are not behind his policy

A short film showing a major explosion in Sloviansk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3WdKawZpXE

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