Sgt Joch

Admittedly it's hard not to feel disgusted by such statements. Really, I don't mean this to be inflamatory and I admit it's easy to say while sitting in my warm home far away from war. Still, the others are humans, too, even if you have good reasons to hate them.
True, but not everyone is a saint and willingly dies for disobeying orders. Orders to shoot at enemies about which propaganda told them for years that they are all a bunch of Nazis and a puppet of NATO.

Fact is - russians already used chemical weapons in Syria and there was zero reaction from anyone.

Hi Steve,
I've been an active member on the forum since your company started and never been warned for anything. 'akd' asked me a question and I answered him.  If something I've said or posted is not factually correct then please correct me rather than call me a 'disinformation propagandist'. At the end of the day its your company m8 but I don't think calling people names eg. 'Kremlin troll' is really helpful.  

Apparently some folks have yet to understand the concept of no-fly zones and their implications, here is a good piece to bring you up to speed.
 
The Dangerous Allure of the No-Fly Zone - War on the Rocks

Everyone said war with Russia was inevitable during the Cold War too. I spent 10 years as an Army officer during the 70s-80s. We pretty much expected that we'd never grow old.
Yet I just turned 65 and retired. War with Russia never happened, despite numerous proxy wars and some (many?) close calls.
This is in no way to minimize Ukraine's plight at the moment, but I think the inevitability and doom predictions are not a new thing. 
I'm not in any way an expert, (give me a target list and I can blow it up, but grand strategy, international relations is above my pay grade) but I believe the aid being provided coupled with the sanctions Russia is coming under will do the job, without increasing the possibility of US/NATO forces coming into direct conflict with Russian forces. That's the thing that during the Cold War, both sides went to lengths to avoid. 
Dave

Sure, might work…
What happens if Russia then decides to launch missiles against against NATO air bases in Eastern Europe or uses its submarines to sink U.S. aircraft carriers close to Russia?
Once you start shooting down Russian planes and killing Russian pilots, you have no idea where this will end up.

well nothing has really changed, there have been wars going on each and every year since 1945 which resulted in millions of deaths. 
since 2001, U.S. Drone and air strikes may have killed as many as 48,000 civilians:
US airstrikes killed at least 22,000 civilians since 9/11, analysis finds | Global development | The Guardian
Just in 2022 you have wars ongoing in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ethiopia, Suadan, South Sudan, Congo, etc..
There are 82 million refugees or internally displaced persons worldwide.
There is nothing special about this war in terms of human suffering that we have not seen before.
The only difference now is that this war is getting massive media attention.

well nothing has really changed, there have been wars going on each and every year since 1945 which resulted in millions of deaths. 
since 2001, U.S. Drone and air strikes may have killed as many as 48,000 civilians:
US airstrikes killed at least 22,000 civilians since 9/11, analysis finds | Global development | The Guardian
Just in 2022 you have wars ongoing in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ethiopia, Suadan, South Sudan, Congo, etc..
There are 82 million refugees or internally displaced persons worldwide.
There is nothing special about this war in terms of human suffering that we have not seen before.
The only difference now is that this war is getting massive media attention.

well nothing has really changed, there have been wars going on each and every year since 1945 which resulted in millions of deaths. 
since 2001, U.S. Drone and air strikes may have killed as many as 48,000 civilians:
US airstrikes killed at least 22,000 civilians since 9/11, analysis finds | Global development | The Guardian
Just in 2022 you have wars ongoing in Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ethiopia, Suadan, South Sudan, Congo, etc..
There are 82 million refugees or internally displaced persons worldwide.
There is nothing special about this war in terms of human suffering that we have not seen before.
The only difference now is that this war is getting massive media attention.

The reason why the EU is so dependent on Russian natural gas and has not made a serious effort to change that is based on a bunch of factors, none of which is easily solved:
1. EU has been increasing its use of natural gas for years since it is considered a "cleaner energy" compared to coal of which the EU has plentiful supplies. Obviously switching back to coal fired plants is a non starter for environmental reasons.
2. Natural Gas is used mostly in industrial production/electricity generation. Residential heating accounts for only a small part of use so just switching off Russian Gas imports would have huge economic impacts;
3. Even if the decision was made to switch, there is no readily available alternative supply. The only other source would be Liquified Natural Gas ("LNG"), but that raises a whole bunch of other issues:
3.1 LNG has to be transported by ships, so you need specialized LNG carriers. You also need specialized LNG terminals both at the export port and the import port in Europe. All of these take a long time to build and a long lead time;
3.2 The EU does not have enough LNG terminals to handle all the LNG that would be required. Last data I saw showed that capacity was at 40% of potential demand. The EU has been planning to add LNG terminals, but you run into the issue that all projects are opposed by environmental groups, i.e. "not in my backyard", so all are stalled at the planning stage;
3.3 even if the port capacity issue is solved, the question is where would the gas come from? The only potential suppliers are USA and Qatar and all of their LNG exports are already accounted for in long term contracts, mostly to Asia where LNG is sold at premium prices. Asia has also been building lots of new LNG import terminals since demand there is taking off as well;
3.4 one way to partially solve the issue would be for the USA to increase natural gas production from shale and build additional LNG export terminals on the East coast/Gulf of Mexico, both ideas which have been discussed, but both are opposed by U.S. environmental groups.
So there you have it. Everyone knows the issues, but solving the problem would require politicians to take unpopular decisions, so it is easier to just delay and keep buying Russian Gas.

Not surprising, I saw another estimate on twitter of roughly 68% In the initial phase of a war, a majority of citizens generally support their own government. That may change if the war lasts months and turns decisively against RussIa.
Implication of course is that the western hope that Putin may be overthrown in a few days or weeks is just wishful thinking.

After my Army service the rest of my career was in the nuclear engineering field (just recently retired). 3 degrees in nuclear engineering and 34 years experience in reactor plant testing, reactor plant design, radiation protection, and nuclear non-proliferation.
In the case of these plants not only have safety features improved, these particular plants are a completely different design than Chernobyl. The Chernobyl "explosion" (it was steam and hydrogen, not a nuclear explosion), was caused by a variety of factors including a rather bizarre design, and operating the plant in a dangerous manner, and then when things went wrong, operators not understanding how the plant would react. EVERY action they took made the situation worse and fed right into the design flaws.
A VVER reactor like the ones being fought over is a pressurized water reactor with up to the current standard safety features, and a robust containment building (Chernobyl didn't have a containment, and Russia had ironically justified that as their design and careful operation not needing it). To cause a serious problem you'd have to cut the off-site power to the plant, while also damaging/destroying all the backup diesel generators or their infrastructure that gets the power to the plants. What do they need power for? Cooling. Even a shutdown reactor needs continual cooling, and how much depends on the power history - how long operating at what power level before shutdown. Spent fuel is stored in cooling pools which also require water cooling. These are inside the containment. This is what happened at Fukushima - the Tsunami swamped the diesel generators and knocked out all electrical power to the region, so they got hot. The explosions seen at Fukushima were from hydrogen buildup in the containments. The sparkers that are designed to safely burn it off actually caused the explosions (old design). The containments at Fukushima were very old, dated designs.
It appeared from the feed that the fighting was going on around office buildings adjacent to the actual containment. These would be engineering, admin, labs, that are part of the plant. 
In short, while having a battle on the grounds of a nuke plant is generally a very bad idea, the potential for serious problem is certainly there, but not on the scale of Chernobyl or even Fukushima.
Hope that helps. Also, it seems this morning that the Ukrainians withdrew and Russians are controlling. Don't know what that means about operators, but the shooting stopped, thank goodness.
Dave
 

it's a dangerous thing to have extrajudicial acts like this.  Understandable given the situation, but they might have been better served having him arrested and airing it for anyone else considering betraying their country.

Nonetheless, Ukraine won’t survive without the West, and the support of the West can become quite tenuous if the war starts to be perceived as “both sides” for war crimes, or more of a civil war with Ukrainians turning on each other and abandoning the rule of law.  Just how it is.

Without getting into the weeds on this, targeting civilian buildings in and of itself, is not a violation of the law of war, context matters.
deliberately targeting civilians is a war crime.
targeting civilian buildings occupied by enemy military units or accidentally hitting civilian buildings while targeting enemy units is not.
Amnesty International always takes an extreme view of this, they also accused U.S./UK/NATO of war crimes for doing similar acts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
 

EU candidate status is just the first part. Turkey received candidate status in 1999...
Steve alluded to it, but a lot of work needs to be done. Ukraine's businesses generally cannot compete against EU businesses and the level of government corruption is still too high by EU standard to name just 2 problems. Despite having 8 years of pro-western govts, these problems have only been partially addressed. In its current state, full EU membership would mean a lot of UKR companies would go bankrupt and the EU having to pour Billions of Euros in to prop up the economy and Govt.
If Ukraine puts in the effort, you might see full membership in 5-10 years.

Interesting summary re effectiveness or otherwise of RU ops and BTG. Not sure on accuracy or sources. Not really my field of knowledge but would be interested in take from those who do?

The reason why Russia will not be cut off from SWIFT is the fact that the EU is still heavily dependent on Russian Oil (27% of oil imports) and natural gas (41% of Gas imports). How is the EU going to pay for Oil/Gas if Russia is cut off from SWIFT and Russia will cut off the flow if they do not get paid.
IMHO, the reason why EU reaction so far is fairly mild is because this has a "France 1940" feel to it. Everyone is in a wait and see pattern. No one wants to make decisions that will be hard to reverse if the whole thing is over in 1-2 weeks.

I'm ok. I just too tired about all these news monitoring, so I havn't enough energy to write here. Today I tried to depart my wife from the city to her parents in more calm Cherkasy oblast, but we can't reach to railway station. Municipal transport stopped on the left bank of Kyiv, though on the right it works like and subway. 
All day from my balcony, wich exits to Obolon' and Vyshhorod periodically heard a sounds of shellings. Now I heard outcoming shots of our 2S7 Pion guns, located in 5 km from my house close to city limit. They fire somewhere to the west, where Russian troops concentrates to attack on the city. All day there were periodycal clashes on the line Irpin'-Bucha-Vorzel-Hostomel. There was attempt of Russian tank attack from Chernobyl zone through Ivankiv on Kyiv, but because of we had a time to demolish the bridges through the Teterev river, they halted. 

no, wanting to be free of U.S. sanctions does not mean it was done for further aggression. There are many reasons why Russia, China, etc. would not want to be subject to U.S. sanctions which do not involve war.

Russia’s economy was disrupted by the 2014 sanctions and they have put measures in place since then to lessen the effectiveness of future western sanctions. Developing an alternative to SWIFT was one, they also developed: 1)closer relations with China, building pipelines and other infrastructure so they would have alternative markets; 2) doing transactions in currency other than U.S. dollars; 3) pushing foreign capital out of strategic industries and replacing it with Russian capital; 4) using more Russian produced goods instead of imports; 5) cracking down on opponents and independent media ,I.e. the “foreign agent” laws; and 6) building up a huge amount of liquid assets, over U.S. $600 billion last time I checked
Now all this does not mean Russia cannot be hurt by western sanctions, but they have more of a cushion than last time.
I don’t think this necessarily means this war has been planned for a long time.

The reason why Russia will not be cut off from SWIFT is the fact that the EU is still heavily dependent on Russian Oil (27% of oil imports) and natural gas (41% of Gas imports). How is the EU going to pay for Oil/Gas if Russia is cut off from SWIFT and Russia will cut off the flow if they do not get paid.
IMHO, the reason why EU reaction so far is fairly mild is because this has a "France 1940" feel to it. Everyone is in a wait and see pattern. No one wants to make decisions that will be hard to reverse if the whole thing is over in 1-2 weeks.

Still not seeing devastating sanctions, Gasprom, Oil and Gas industries were not hit and despite what seems like heated discussions, removing Russia from SWIFT is not on the table.
From what I can tell, despite the now hot war, gas is still flowing normally from Russia through Ukrainian pipelines on to the EU.

I was a very militant communist during the late 70s-early 80s when I was young and thought I could change the world, but that is another story.
Most young "communists" back then were actually Marxists who thought of the Soviet Union as being only slightly better than the USA. Most Marxists believed the type of state controlled economy in the USSR set up under Lenin and Stalin had little to do with Marx's original concept and was just a different style of imperialism and capitalism with a governing class made up of top Party bureaucrats. The left-wing political filmmaker Costa Gravas released "The Confession" in the early 70s which was a powerful indictment against the Stalinist show trials in Czechoslovakia in the early 50s which had a big impact on many of us back then.
The point is that it is extremely doubtful any of the Euro communists who were actually more social-democrats than real hardline communists would have seen a Soviet invasion as a "liberation". They would actually be more likely to want to defend western democracy which despite all its flaws is still better than Soviet style "People's Democracy".

not in game, Panther has weaker side armour, even regular U.S. 75mm AP can KO a Panther from the sides at 600 meters.