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[Duuvian]

To be fair, I was appalled that Putin had succeeded in a long term and multinational trick on Xi into supporting his ambitions (directly counter to China's stances on intervention btw) by running a massively successful 5th column in the West driving anti-China sentiment in peoples skeptical of China or ideologically opposed to communism, often while supporting their own nation's similar behaviors to show hypocrsy to the audience of Xi. This doesn't make the bad things China sometimes does with it's national policies acceptable to me, but the current situation of antagonism being pushed as deisrable makes it far, far less likely for the West to be able to influence China's troubling policies morally and moreover distracts from problems within our own nations.

It happens everywhere. I don't think there has been a person anywhere in the world not impacted by Putin's machinations. I would not be surprised if in Antarctica there is a person shedding a snowflake to drift melancholy to the ice when they read this.

https://www.theafricareport.com/150126/russia-mali-who-is-spreading-moscows-soft-power-in-bamako/

That said, is there any recent evidence that China is supporting Putin in this? As far as I've read, they backed away immedietely into neutrality and Chinese banks are divesting from Russia to avoid sanctions from a much larger share of their trading partners.

[martinuzz]

If you have cryptocurrency you should probably get rid of it now, before it is banned. I would not be surprised if that happens, now that various crypto platforms refuse to join sanctions.

EDIT: Maersk stops all import and export to and from Russia except for humanitarian goods.

[Loud Whispers]

I'm gonna be skeptical on Putin being the grand mastermind behind literally every political shift in the last 20 years; the USA had already begun shifting its focus to the Pacific under Obama as a response to China's encroachment in the South China Seas & Naval expansion, it's giving Putin way too much credit whilst downplaying Chinese & US aspirations

[pisskop]

PTW

Crypto is going to have a rough year for other reasons than not wanting to join sanctions.  We are all going to collectively have a (more) choppy year now that this escalation has occured though.



P:  Is the Ukrainian crisis a 'war' proper? 

[Il Palazzo]

Racism has nothing to do with this

Normal people give priority to women, infirm, and children over adult healthy men who think that they should be first in line simply because they are foreigners

I am disgusted that those students play the racism card in this situation

Oh, please. There are women as well as men reporting discrimination. These are not 'me first' complaints.

[JoshuaFH]

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/1/us-rules-out-ukraine-no-fly-zone-after-zelenskyy-appeal

Biden, put together a fucking army on the Western border of Ukraine and start working towards a no fly zone, stop with this pussy shit. Even if your primary concern is re-election like it always is with the polishits in your crew, how you think you do with Putin in Kiev in November? Stop looking for the easy way out, you have Putin right where you want him except that he sees you doing not enough to counter the invasion and backing away. Whatever happened to "all options on the table"? Is that limited to opponents who don't have nukes? No wonder they are so popular in "rogue" states!

Biden has a very tough balancing act to maintain. On the one hand, he's ostensibly supposed to be upholding peace, freedom, and democracy from within and without the United States. But on the other hand, he's meant to actually be one of the 'cyclical democrats' who's only job is to continually neuter the democratic party, cede ground to Republicans, and slowly push America deeper into Corporatist Fascism through either inaction or lukewarm and fruitless actions that makes Left-leaning politics look nutless and unattractive.

Right now Biden is in serious danger of becoming very popular. And if he becomes popular, then the democratic party by extension becomes popular. And if the democratic party becomes popular, then Left-leaning ideologies and politics start to look admirable and attractive. He just can't have that, he's supposed to be a puppet that makes them look bad; but this situation in Ukraine requires direct intervention in order to defuse, anyone can see that; and direct intervention almost guarantees becoming the most popular man on the planet; but Biden has to find a way to remain unpopular through all this without giving up the game. Biden's just in a real no-win situation, he just doesn't have many options that don't wind up undoing decades of political manipulation.

[martinuzz]

P:  Is the Ukrainian crisis a 'war' proper? 

How else would you call invading and bombing another sovereign country?

[Starver]

As I read it (female and child) Ukrainian refugees are being prioritised, for obvious reasons. The sheer uptick in border-crossings means they can hardly cope with that new backlog so that, even expedited, it isn't the quick process it might have been on a family trip a couple of weeks ago. Anyone of 'normal' priority is going to be just experiencing the delays without the humanitarian considerations, seeing the mass of other people going ahead of them.

I'm not saying there isn't racism of the bald, everyday, sort, that it's hard to monitor and try to correct when every hand is needed at the pumps. People get that way, or are insufficiently guided away from such prejudices.

And there may be forms of institutional racism, too, perhaps with a basis in previously trying to deal with all kinds of through-migrants who arrive with vastly unfamiliar paperwork that needs extra time to deal with. Extra time that it's perhaps easier to dedicate to just dealing with another dozen family-units who happen to have comparatively  easy-to-confirm confirmation that they're (normally) non-peripatetic residents of Kyev.

It's a mess, and hard cases get noticed. A single racist border-official can deliberately impede everyone of African heritage he can, just because, and paints the whole office in a bad light. A rush of a tour-group has to be dealt with together (probably not keen to separate) when extended-family groups can probably fragment into mother-and-her-children subunits with little more fuss than "...and we'll meet by the lime-tree, or phone to let us know you're already on the way to your parents-in-law".

Not saying it couldn't be done better. Not saying it's not actually prejudice, at times. Just that a small numbers of specific complaints are easier to latch onto than the large numbers having their own more generalised difficulties. Both ends need to be dealt with, but a lot of this is beyond any normal level of training and guidance so I expect it to be rocky, and barely anywhere along the path to a finely-tuned solution before everything changes again (in whatever way from a number of quite disperate futures).

[Ulfarr]

P:  Is the Ukrainian crisis a 'war' proper? 

How else would you call invading and bombing another sovereign country?

A Roadside Picnic 

[martinuzz]

Russia has announced it will soon start attacking locations of the Ukrainian secret service in Kiev, as well as unspecified locations of Ukrainian 'special forces'.
It urges people living in the vicinity of such sites to evacuate.

[Cthulhu]

There's never going to be a no fly zone.  A no fly zone means direct armed conflict between NATO and Russia, not just in the sky over Ukraine since you have to neutralize air defenses and that means attacking targets on Russian/NATO countries' soil. 

Let's not start a nuclear war over this please, I'm not done playing elden ring.

[martinuzz]

The UN refugee agency warns that Europe is about to face the largest refugee crisis of the century.
660000 Ukrainians have already fled the country in the past week, of whom 150000 in the past 24 hours

The last 'refugee crisis', which prompted the EU to strike a deal with Erdogan about sheltering refugees in Turkey, was about some 150000 refugees.... Per year, not per day.

If we are going to want to shelter all of them, we are going to have to forget about Paris climate agreement and EU environmental regulations for a while, and start mass building housing. At least over here in Western Europe, housing shortages are already through the roof (as in: wait 12 years before your turn is up to rent a house, live with your parents until you're 35) and a lot of new housing projects were banned in court because of the CO2 and fine dust emissions.

[Starver]

Russia has announced it will soon start attacking locations of the Ukrainian secret service in Kiev, as well as unspecified locations of Ukrainian 'special forces'.
It urges people living in the vicinity of such sites to evacuate.

In other words "We'll attack where we want to, it's not our fault that your civilians aren't aware of the same facts that we apparently do about your covert assets. And, if we're actually proven 'wrong', that's your fault for hiding them better than we could find them, or even intentionally providing misdirections."


In reality, any Special Forces still at their well-publicised home-bases are not going to be a threat (administrative crews only, those not now fully bunkered for C&C), the ones out in the field willl be using their preparations and field-craft to be as impossible to target as possible, when not in actual combat. Similarly, however obvious the 'main' spy-agency building is(/buildings are) no doubt there are far more anonymous/ad hoc safe-houses and secured office-space wired up than can be known about. To assume otherwise would be to imagine an incompetence amongst the Ukrainians that we're not seeing in other aspects of their continuing defence.

[Duuvian]

I apologize about the angry tone of my diatribe above and especially for the profane namecalling, which was unneccessary and I regret. However I am very tired of this being the result so often, no matter where it occurs.

Ctuhlu, I don't think Putin would use nuclear weapons unless Russia itself is threatened with invasion. He has a long life ahead of him that a nuclear exchange / railguns from space would hinder, even in an elaborate bunker. There may even be the possiibility he does care for his people despite the results of his actions. An exception maybe tactical nukes, but if I were playing in a Paradox game as Putin doing this crazy gambit I wouldn't use them except in the case of breaking an encirclement that captures a large portion of my army otherwise because I would reasonably fear the consequences of such a terrible action even if it resulted in short term victory, since the other side has them too but doctrine does not include first use of tactical nukes (if I understand it correctly, I may be wrong not an expert).

JoshuaFH, that is funny. I don't think it is true but I could see why by events it seems credible.

Spoiler: Belongs in Ameripol thread (click to show/hide)

I think Biden genuinely (and at least attempts to) works with liberals, but that some parts of the party hinder that and faction against liberals harder but more quietly than against conservatives. Meanwhile there is what may be to my non-New England eyes to possibly be a (pro-corp?) moderate formation that is doing big things at the state and municipal level in at least one of the most prominent blue citystates that heavily influences Democratic party policy everywhere. I don't follow that enough to comment beyond airing vague and probably baseless suspiscions. Such is the internet, after all; take me with a grain of salt!

[martinuzz]

China has started evacuating it's citizens from Ukraine. Yesterday, 600 Chinese students were brought to Moldavia in busses.
Another 1000 were tranported there today. The Chinese government tells the remaing 5000-ish Chinese in Ukraine to use the evacuation trains provided by the Ukrainian government (in other words, you're on your own now).

China's late evacuation feeds rumours that China has been caught by surprise when Russia invaded the Ukraine.
The Chinese embassy didn't start an inventarisation of Chinese in the country until after the invasion had already begun, where most other countries in the world had already advised their citizens to leave a week earlier.

At first, Chinese citizens were advised to wear Chinese flags, and that would assure their safety.
But guess what, Ukrainians aren't very happy with China not condemning Putin. Wearing a Chinese flag in the Ukraine right now is ill advised.
Chinese students are afraid to go to bomb shelters when the air raid alarms sound, they fear they will not be treated nicely there.

EDIT:

‘The oligarchs need to watch out’: France says it will seize Russian assets.

French authorities are working to identify and seize homes, luxury cars, yachts and other France-based assets held by Russian oligarchs targeted for European Union sanctions, as well as Russians close to President Vladimir V. Putin who “might be hit” by new penalties, Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said Tuesday.

French banks and insurance companies are also combing through millions of accounts to identify Russians on the sanctions list, as well as members of their families and any holding companies they may have set up to hide their identities, he said.

I guess now is not the time to have an uncle or aunt in Russia that's friendly with Putin.