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Zudgemud posted:I would guess any organized crime worth it's salt would have no problem obtaining either smoke grenades or a radiojammer and get through a border "undetected" in land so infested with corruption as Russia. These are not street thugs, these can be semicriminal billion dollar enterprises with huge networks and logistical support. If it was the Mafia, it was also brilliantly timed, since in the current situation, most people will think immediately "Oh no Russia strikes again".
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Sep 5, 2014 16:38
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In other news, NATO and Ukraine finally started their planned military exercise in the Black Sea has started. Russia protests of course and sends a missile cruiser to observe the maneuver. Also some guy from Russia called Alexej Puschkow has demanded clarification from NATO about the purpose of the non-existend weapon deliveries into Ukraine.
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Sep 8, 2014 13:38
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Lucy Heartfilia posted:Really? Soon noone will be able to go to space? Except the Chinese. We could ask them if they take a few of our astronauts with them. 
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Sep 10, 2014 13:53
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Just a head's up for our friends in Estonia, Four German Eurofighters and 160 German soldiers are now stationed in Estonia. The small unit is part of an NATO-effort to secure the Baltics' air space. In other news, Poroshenko wants to build his own version of the Maginot-line. Hopefully it works better then the French version! Merkel also said she wanted the new sanctions put into work immediately, but now apparently other nations are dragging their feet. Welp, that's the great European Union at work, chaotic as usual.
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Sep 11, 2014 09:37
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Cuntpunch posted:This'll bite them in the rear end in twenty years when they want to go back and realize it's not as easy as just refuelling the reactors. In twenty years we have all the geothermal powerplants we'll ever need. Also we can then use them to handily solve all of our problems with Russia, too: We just have to make sure all our accidentally produced earthquakes are hitting Russia instead of us. (Yes, some types of geothermal powerplants can provoke earthquakes. Still less problematic than a nuclear GAU, of course. )
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Sep 11, 2014 23:41
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After the sea, now the land: NATO-exercise "Rapid Trident" has started in the Ukraine.
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Sep 15, 2014 12:28
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Russia will never be internationally isolated. It is cold in Germany and short of nuking something there is nothing Putin could do that would make Germans accept paying higher gas prices. Especially bad now that Germany has abandoned a big chunk of its power generating capacity due to ludditism and is instead building solar panels in one of the shittiest climates on Earth. Every time I read poo poo this stupid I just get sad. Does living close to nuclear reactors damage the brain or why do you think we heat with solar panels? Really, sometimes posts like this read as if they were written by the CEO of a huge American gas company or something.
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Sep 16, 2014 17:17
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Rent-A-Cop posted:Are you trying to argue that Germany doesn't import a shitload of Russian gas or that Russian gas won't make up at least part of the 50+ TWh per year shortfall coming from decommissioning nuclear plants? Seriously bad timing to be shooting your own energy production in the foot just when your major energy supplier is invading its neighbors left and right. Hard to stand up lead Europe when you can't impose meaningful sanctions and keep the heat on at the same time. No I'm not. Heating without Putin's gas is still a problem and will stay a problem for years to come. Electricity isn't, we simply don't use enough imported fossil fuel for that to matter. Our coal plants alone could take the difference. Even without any changes at all, we would only get into trouble if wind and solar power suddenly cuts out 100%. And I can tell you we all will have a lot more trouble to think about than Russians if the sun goes out. Here's a nice blog article from back in March about this.
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Sep 16, 2014 19:18
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According to this article (at the bottom, last paragraph), members of the Council of Europe have demanded an immediate withdrawal of foreign (=Russian) troops from Ukraine and a reestablishment of its souvereignty. Looks like the diplomatic language is getting even rougher now.
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Oct 3, 2014 15:36
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Sheng-ji Yang posted:Ah, that explains the picture. Actually, in mythology, a mandrake is supposed to be a plant which looks like a human and if disturbed, emits a horrible cry. Some sources claim the cry of a mandrake kills those who hear it. For the picture of an artist, I would assume mythical reasoning trumps plain old "it's a poisonous plant".
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Oct 5, 2014 12:22
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Good news, Ukrainians! Germany is sending help. The Bundeswehr is also planning a mission to do drone-recon in Eastern Ukraine, to see if the ceasefire is holding. But then it turned out our minister of defense was a little bit too fast in promising this mission. Uh Oh! Now the German help convoy only needs to be delayed by something ludicrous and the trifecta of German military absurdities will be complete for this year. (The second failure was/is our attempt at sending weapons, ammunition and weapon trainers to help the Kurds against ISIS. This didn't work exactly like planned.) I would be laughing if this poo poo wouldn't be so shameful. 
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Oct 6, 2014 13:24
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The German help convoy has reached Ukraine. The goods will be brought into the east of the country soon, mostly stuff like generators, winter clothes, blankets and heaters. Sadly, we have no tanks and trucks to spare like the Russians, so we'll only help the civilians.
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Oct 7, 2014 23:42
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Finlander posted:What are the chances that the terrorists will straight up fire upon the help convoys and try to take everything for themselves? Honestly? Considering the army is the only thing that works in the Bundeswehr, all bets are off. With our flying forces one could reasonably assume nothing, since every machine we'd try to send would be broken anyway, but in this case our braindead monkeys impersonating politicians could very well decide to do something stupid and escalate to far, too fast. Fintilgin posted:I assume this aid is being delivered to the the eastern part of the country under Ukrainian control and to Ukrainian authorities for distribution. I don't think they're going to be entering Russian occupied territory and delivering goods to the 'rebels'. Also this.
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Oct 8, 2014 00:03
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Dolash posted:Separatists already shot down an airliner filled with EU citizens and Europe offered an anemic shrug in response. I don't think there's any attack the separatists could perpetrate at this point that would provoke military reaction out of Germany - the attack that killed a Red Cross worker was barely a blip. Sadly you underestimate how dumb German politicians can be. German politicians could be replaced by a dartboard with random suggestions on it and apes throwing darts and you would get more reasonable decisions out of them. Remember, our defense minister already promised sending soldiers into Ukraine for a recon mission before she had to backpedal because she didn't tell her fellow politicians about her idea beforehand.
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Oct 8, 2014 12:25
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I just read a news article about milk production in Germany. Apparently our prices on milk and stuff made from milk were on a record-high earlier this year. Now discounters have pointed to the Russian embargo on milk and slashed prices far enough they're 40% lower then at the beginning of the year. Right now those lower prices are slowly given out to us, the consumers. Some chains like Aldi have already reduced the endprice for cheese and cream by 13%. So I wanted to say thank you, Russia, for helping our poor buy cheap milk and cheese. We're appreciating your efforts to help. Hopefully the embargo goes on for a few months longer, so our discounters can make mad money with very slowly dropping prices. Everyone benefits! The article. Libluini fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Oct 10, 2014 |
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Oct 10, 2014 14:01
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Ardennes posted:It probably isn't necessarily a good thing for German/European agriculture though, Eurozone (for a variety of reasons) may enter a recession at some point in 2015. Yeah, between Iraq, Syria and now Ukraine, it seems the German consumer is just holding back for now. So Russia inadvertently helping us by holding our food prices low is just a little early repayment for all that fuckery over Ukraine. And of course German governmental incompotence isn't helping matters.
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Oct 10, 2014 14:14
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Those plans are secret? I thought we already supported Ukraine? Well, mostly with moral support...
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Oct 10, 2014 20:25
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awesome-express posted:oh no not the nato flag At least they didn't burn the EU-flag, or people would have given even less of a poo poo.
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Oct 15, 2014 00:54
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According to this article, it looks like the sanctions are slowly eroding Russia's economy from within. Especially the "sanctions" Russia burdened itself with are hurting them now. Apparently Russian companies didn't just magically produce more to make up for the missing imports. At the end the article mentions some concern about Russia slowly getting desperate.
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Oct 17, 2014 13:02
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Fabulous Knight posted:These meetings make me pretty sad. The EU is not willing to fight tooth and nail for Ukraine whereas Russia is (which is logical, of course). Russia can just break whatever deal they agree on later on and there will be just as few consequences. Why should the EU fight tooth and nail when Russia starts struggling with a few small sanctions already? Given enough time, Russia either has to give in or face serious inner trouble.
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Oct 17, 2014 16:15
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SA_Avenger posted:And I who thought only southern french considered belgians northerners That map reminds me of some old school maps of yesteryear. Germany and everything to the left of it was labeled "Western Europe" and everything to the east was labeled "Mordor".
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Oct 18, 2014 11:58
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HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:Russian authorities are shutting down McDonalds restaurants all over the country. At least this one time Putin does something positive for his people.
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Oct 19, 2014 23:13
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kalstrams posted:I've heard this one from my grandmother, but I can not testify if is general sentiment in Latvia. I've heard from my mother about draught making you ill, so it's not only in Eastern Europe. Libluini fucked around with this message at 19:58 on Oct 21, 2014 |
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Oct 21, 2014 19:22
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Jim DiGriz posted:We had a lightning strike fry the cable modem and the Ethernet ports of every device attached to it. Don't know how it could happen, probably getting in via the coax cable coming in. As someone who had to replace his ceramic breakers after a heavy thunder storm once, this should not happen. Didn't your breakers jump? Hell, several times lighter thunder storms have knocked out my normal breakers. I'm pretty sure I don't even need all the extension leads with build-in breakers I bought and attached to my outlets just in case the breakers are too late some day. (Someone who needs his computer should still have them, of course.) Edit: Woops, this was for the other thread. My bad. Ukraine and Russia arrive at an arrangement about gas prices. Progress with baby steps. Libluini fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Oct 22, 2014 |
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Oct 22, 2014 09:36
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Ardennes posted:The vast majority aren't immigrants though, just ethnic Russians who were on the other side of the fence when the SSRs broke up. To be honest, I think one of the most depressing things about this thread is how careless Latvians especially seem to be about the situation and don't really get that it gives Putin ammo. Just be glad those idiots aren't treated like people in Germany refusing to learn the language, I think it's not even possible to live in Germany without either being a citizen or having been granted asylum. I think if in Germany a group of people would be refusing to integrate up to the point where they're not even trying to get sanctuary, they would just be transported forcefully back to their homecountry. Now can you imagine how Putin would react if Latvia just do this like us and started expelling its ethnic Russians?
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Oct 22, 2014 12:50
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Mightypeon posted:Meanwhile, it appears that Radek Sikorski was completely full of it when stating that Putin made offers to divide Ukraine with poland. This article goes a bit more into detail about this. Apparently something happened between Tusk and Putin, but Sikorski only had hearsay and reports to go on and essentially said 1-2 words too much in that particular, not even authorised interview. So no, he didn't made this up, he was just not careful enough to have 100% watertight proof before opening his mouth.
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Oct 23, 2014 13:01
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kalstrams posted:While we still are on the same page, my virtual vote goes to physicist. It also is easy to see then where Romania goes, since in Latvia many notable politicians are either physicists or mathematicians. This reminds me, Latvia seems to be like Germany in this matter, since we also for some reason trust politicians more if they have an academic title somewhere. Angela Merkel is a physicist, for example.
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Oct 23, 2014 18:47
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Poland now wants a strong Bundeswehr. Apparently 80% of our Polish neighbours are nervous about Russia's future military plans, while less then 7% still see Germany as a threat. In some other articles about the Bundeswehr (same site as linked above), there's some weird thing going on where a heavy increase of the budget in 1-2 years is almost certainly coming, but no-one wants to say something concrete as to not scare potential voters. In the meantime, our defense minister is planning to rearrange some money from her financial reserves to pay for a program to make the Bundeswehr more attractive next year, without using up money which is meant to combat our massive structural problems. If she pulls this move off, she has been almost assured to get more money afterwards, so then she can of course move money back before holes open up all over the place. (If she can't the Bundeswehr is hosed, as always.) Our massively bureaucratic, slow and underfinanced military procurement bureaus are getting targeted by new reforms, again. This time however our defense minister von der Leyen plans to give our military-industrial-complex a likewise massive "gently caress you" by finally allowing our military to buy equipment from non-German sources. This essentially means if our defense minister can survive her reforms (no other minister has achieved this yet, the defense ministry in Germany is infamous for killing politicians careers like some sort of weird serial killer), our military industry has to finally stop abusing our military forces as a testing ground for their products and instead has to actually attempt to deliver their products in a timely manner. Now all this wouldn't have happened without Putin and the war in Ukraine, so I feel like I should write a thank-you-letter to Putin for forcing us to finally confront all the sludge the Bundeswehr has build up since the end of the Cold War. Well, OK most of those problems are way older, but the decay accelerated massively after the Cold War ended. Libluini fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Oct 23, 2014 |
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Oct 23, 2014 21:44
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Charlotte Hornets posted:I bought weed from the Roma once. I was beaten up by a gang of Roma-children in my childhood and I still don't get all that crapping on Roma by my fellow Europeans. It must be cognitive dissonance in action or something. 
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Oct 29, 2014 20:58
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After Germany's weird shadow-dance of trying to borrow money from the future to secretly make the Bundeswehr-budget higher but maybe not, Poland is going full in. No trying to fight giving money to the army here, Poland just rises it's defense budget and continues with modernizing it's army. Also a part of said army gets relocated from the western to the eastern border. Part of that modernization is restoring the eastern defense systems (barracks, bases, that kind of stuff) back to working order to house the sizable portion of the Polish army flooding in soon.
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Oct 30, 2014 14:55
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my dad posted:It looks like Russia is going to reduce their export of gas to Serbia by 28%. Wasn't Serbia on their side anyway? Is this some new strategy to make more enemies for Russia?
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Oct 31, 2014 15:29
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Russia still thinks it hasn't made enough enemies: The chairman of the Green's parliamentary group in the European Parliament has been forbidden from travelling to Russia. Russia never told her, though. Until she arrived in Moscow, that is. Then they told her, making her entire trip completely pointless. This is more then just a simple troll, by the way: She was supposed to observe a court session for the trial against the Ukrainian pilot Nadeschda Sawtschenko. Said pilot is not only held by Russia now, Russia is actively trying to get her sentenced for murder. Stuff like this is tailor-made to make everyone involved angry, especially the German establishment. Edit: Our foreign ministry is already throwing a poo poo fit. 2nd Edit: Up to 26 Russian planes, including strategic bombers, have travelled around Europe to give us a little visit by now. North Sea, Black Sea, Baltic Sea, from Eastern Europe to Portugal, always meticulously staying above international waters. Enough intrusions, even some German fighters got a chance to intercept some Russians. Libluini fucked around with this message at 18:19 on Oct 31, 2014 |
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Oct 31, 2014 18:11
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Dolash posted:It's a pretty egregious case of Russia lording their untouchableness over Ukraine, since if Ukraine were to capture Russian soldiers (as it has in the past, like with the paratroopers) then put them on trial and throw them in jail Russia would throw an ungodly shitfit. It might even become their casus belli for explicit invasion. They can do it to Ukraine though, with a deliberate "What are you going to do about it? Invade us?" tone. It's nice of them though to give ample warning to China to better ally with us, because our stupidity is at least of the reliable sort.
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Oct 31, 2014 19:05
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Phlegmish posted:Wait, they actually created an organization called the ASCE? That wasn't a joke? The way this is going, I now fully expect our grandchildren to ask us at some point in the future why the third world war was called "The Gay Wars".
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Nov 3, 2014 18:29
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HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:Can't wait for this and I know you'll provide a link when it is available online. The really dumb and funny thing here is, this is exactly what Neo-Nazis and the far right in Germany have always claimed: We didn't really "invade" the Sowjet Union, the Sowjet Union was already building up weapons to invade us, we just defended ourselves offensively! (Also the USA and the West should have totally changed sides and helped us destroy
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Nov 6, 2014 16:27
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We invaded Poland with Germany just to make it look good to them.
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My Imaginary GF posted:"Communist" means anti-American. Putin is anti-American. Ergo, Putin is a communist. No it doesn't. Stop being stupid.
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Nov 6, 2014 18:54
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Warcabbit posted:People were saying Putin could support the ruble for two years. I'm assuming the oligarches have converted all their money to dollars or some other currency, but how long will they stand for the devaluation of their holdings? If you read tomorrow about some huge explosion killing Putin and some random Muslim getting the blame, you know how long they stood for it.
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Nov 7, 2014 13:29
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Sergiu64 posted:Another good article on Russian Troll Farms: http://www.interpretermag.com/russia-this-week-the-kremlins-growing-army-of-internet-trolls/ Luckily it seems like Russia plans their own version of the internet, blocked off from the rest of the world, so in a way Russia already preemtively working at dismantling their army of internet trolls.
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Nov 14, 2014 21:05
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OhYeah posted:I ask again. Was Putin excpecting a less cold reception? Apparently. He also did run away in the end. I guess he reconsidered his reconsideration of his early retirement from the G20? After all, he has work to do on Monday.
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Nov 16, 2014 13:13
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Cat Mattress posted:Yes? The only point subject to debate here is whether the Buk was given by Russia, captured from Ukraine, or maybe both (captured by Ukraine from Russian reinforcements first, then captured by separatists, as it has happened to some tanks). But the core "separatists shot down the airliner thinking it was an Ukrainian military plane" is not in question, despite all the clunky Russian propaganda. The BND also thinks the Russian claims are all filthy, filthy lies. So there is that.
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Nov 16, 2014 13:46
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