Tuna-Fish posted:

Point of order, the green transformation makes central europe more dependent on Russian gas, not less. We are still very far (multiple decades) away from when there is sufficient renewable+storage capacity to handle the times when it's both dark and not windy. This means that Germany must have substantial dispatchable capacity to back up their intermittent power, and they are continuing to run down their baseload production.

Given the massive methane leaks from Russian gas production, the most environmentally friendly way for Germany to supply their domestic power for the next few decades would be to start fracking their shale deposits. But that can't be done because someone made a documentary full of lies about it or something.

a podcast for cats posted:

In the same vein, Portugal being honorary Eastern Europe due to various socioeconomic metrics is a Reddit meme I've noticed. I'll reserve judgement on whether it's true until I get a chance to visit.

Ataxerxes posted:

Yea, Finnish or English only, sadly.

And that literacy thing is interesting. I remember reader and article about Ukraine I think (but I might misremember) at that time when the Russian authorities banned printing books in Ukrainian but re-printing old ones were allowed. People supposedly kept printing all sorts of stuff and insisting they were repringts of a particular innocent poetry books. Supposedly to this day no-one knows all the things that got printed under that one title. From Marx to mathematics books, supposedly everything.

Mokotow posted:

Whenever I read or hear about stuff in Argentina, I get strong EE vibes. But then there’s so much more there that makes it anything but 🤷‍♂️

HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:

Is my thread permanently closed?

HUGE PUBES A PLUS posted:

That makes sense. If the time comes to merge back let me know and I can make a new one.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

To give you a rough idea of where Eastern Europe is, red is Eastern Europe, green is honorary Eastern Europe, and pink is brother and sister regions.

Somaen posted:

Yeah, they are screwed. No idea what they can do short term, but they are also the friendliest countries w/r/t Russia so bullying them is a bad idea compared to bullying Poland and the Baltics which were already hostile. Though Putin's current act is putting russia-understanders in a very awkward place and inshallah this will force the countries to look for alternatives

Torrannor posted:

Too bad that there's a perfectly fine carbon neutral energy source that for example France utilizes heavily, but is for unfortunate reasons not the most populous energy source in many parts of the world. Primarily due to a thing happening in EE.

quote:

Who will blink first. Against the backdrop of unprecedented tensions, the political bargaining that Moscow wanted begins


Last week, expectations of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine reached a peak by mid-February, and became almost a consensus in the public space. The President of France, the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and Defense of Great Britain visited Moscow without much success, and a meeting of political advisers to the leaders of the countries participating in the Normandy format was held in Berlin, following which the Russian representative Dmitry Kozak did not hide his disappointment.

In addition, Vladimir Putin held telephone conversations with the President of the United States and once again with the President of France, and is also waiting for a meeting with the German Chancellor on February 15. At the same time, Ukraine turned to the OSCE on the issue of Russian military activity, and the Baltic countries turned to the same on the issue of military activity on the territory of Belarus, where the major Russian-Belarusian military exercise "Allied Resolve" is being held from February 10 to 20, 2022. All this happened against the backdrop of the inexplicable evacuation of Western diplomats and military advisers from Ukraine, as well as the relocation of the consulates of some Western countries to Lviv. For comparison, in 2012, American diplomats continued to work in Libya even in the face of obvious mortal danger (unfortunately, materialized).

At the same time, Moscow is holding a pause: at the time of writing, it still does not give its official reaction to the US and NATO response to Russian demands for security guarantees, does not take radical or simply abrupt steps, but does not relieve the tension it has created either. Even the deputies of the State Duma, who were going to appeal to Vladimir Putin with a request to recognize the DPR/LPR, may have decided to wait. In general, there is a classic game of "who will blink first." However, the rational political framework of this game still seems clearer today.

The Russian authorities are hardly driven by suicidal moods to plan a "Ukrainian blitzkrieg" in the current situation and in the presence of relevant experience of several military campaigns. However, they want to make the most of the situation they have created. Thus, it is obvious that the Russian agencies involved are working out and agreeing on a political reaction to the proposals received from the US and NATO on various aspects of arms control. If this reaction involves the implementation of unnamed military-technical measures, then these measures should serve as a prologue to the subsequent and possibly lengthy negotiation process. Meaning, they should keep in place, and even better, expand Russia's space for diplomatic maneuver, and not reduce it. If the Russian leadership is preparing to come up with counter proposals and sit down at the negotiating table, then it is very important for it not to sell too cheap. Reducing tensions and moving away from the original demands for security guarantees, if things go well, should not be a condition for starting negotiations, but an asset that is exchanged for concessions from the United States and the West as a whole.

The détente should not be a condition for starting negotiations, but an asset to be exchanged for concessions from the West

Such desired concessions in the Kremlin can be considered, for example, the actual coercion by Western players of Kiev to implement the Set of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements (Minsk-2) on Russian terms. That is, we are talking first about the reintegration of the DPR/LPR into Ukraine, and only then about the transfer of control over the border of these entities with Russia to Ukraine, while Ukraine itself naturally wants the process from the opposite end. True, Moscow itself probably no longer believes in the relevance of Minsk-2, which recently turned seven years old. And therefore, another concession option can be considered the tacit consent of the West to Moscow's unilateral reformatting of the entire Donbass problem without a serious violation of the current line of demarcation.

Here I repeat once again that it is impossible to rule out the open introduction of Russian troops into the DPR/LPR (unofficially they have been present there for the past few years) under the pretext of protecting several hundred thousand Russian citizens, followed by limited but demoralizing strikes against the Ukrainian armed forces. The result here can be either forcing Kiev to the conditional “Minsk-3”, or even recognition of the DNR/LNR. The latter, although it will reduce Russia's ability to exert political pressure on Ukraine, can hypothetically be seen as an opportunity to turn the page in relations with the West - by analogy with Abkhazia and South Ossetia after the August 2008 war.

Interestingly, during a telephone conversation between Putin and Biden on February 12, the American president warned Russia against “further invasion” of Ukraine (“…if Russia undertakes a further invasion of Ukraine…”). This thesis can also be read as follows: if Moscow does not invade the territory that the Ukrainian government actually controls as of today, then the United States could turn a blind eye to the rest. That is, at the level of political rhetoric, a new status quo is being constituted, where the West, in everyday political practice, does not ask Russia about its presence in the DPR/LPR, and even more so does not ask about Crimea. As a result, the Ukrainian agenda in Russia's relations with the United States and Europe is receding into the background, giving way to diplomatic classics - arms control and big trade issues. And even in this scenario, the American administration could get the symbolic role it seeks as a side that prevented a hypothetical major war. At a minimum, the Kremlin is very sensitive to such rhetorical details and can interpret them as written above.

Moreover, at the current stage of the crisis, almost no one is asking the question about Belarus, which in military terms is reaching a qualitatively different level of interaction with Russia, further eroding the political autonomy of the Lukashenka regime. In this context, it is no longer so important how many troops Russia deployed to the republic for the Allied Resolve-2022 exercises. For example, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg spoke about 30,000 people. Putin allegedly informed French President Macron that this figure was up to 30,000. My conservative estimates give only 5-7 thousand people, since I proceed from the fact that Russia complies with the Vienna Document regulating the number of troops involved in military exercises, and in the modern Russian army there is a large range of various military equipment, creating the impression of transferring tens of thousands of military personnel

However, this, by and large, is not so important: according to the results of autumn 2021 - winter 2022. Moscow, in fact, is accustoming the West to the idea of ​​a permanent Russian military presence in Belarus. And the West is showing agreement with this situation. Moreover, any future negotiations on this matter will most likely no longer concern the very fact of the Russian military presence in this country, but only specific types of weapons and forces deployed there.

At the same time, the process of transferring and concentrating troops and military equipment also has a completely valuable practical meaning - Russia is working out military logistics for the future in a priority direction for itself. The fact is that the military reform has been carried out, weapons have been updated, confrontation with NATO has long been a part of long-term political and military planning, and Russia had no experience of a relatively quick transfer of large forces within the continent until 2021. In addition, the State Armaments Program (SAP) for 2024-2033. is under development, and the current Russian military activity can be perceived as a necessary condition for its adequate formation. Here it is also necessary to take into account that the previous SAP for 2011-2020. was created on the basis of the experience of the war with Georgia, and the current SAP for 2018-2027. is the “homework” of GPV 2020 plus lessons learned from the campaign in Syria. Thus, the Russian military and defense industry has already received a lot of valuable information from the current situation.

Thus, the Kremlin is trying to force the West into a deal. He wants to include in it a wide range of issues in the field of arms control, a new status quo in Belarus and, possibly, Donbass (the latter, I repeat, is valuable for Moscow not in itself, but only in the context of relations with the West), as well as general stabilization political and economic relations with the United States and Europe. And the fact that on February 14 there was talk of Ukraine's voluntary abandonment of its course towards joining NATO speaks in favor of the bargaining that has begun, and not in favor of the fact that Moscow is going to land amphibious assault forces in Odessa in a couple of days.

Osmosisch posted:

My wife made me vegetarian bigos on our first date and it's held a special place in my heart ever since ❤️

Mokotow posted:

One of the most fascinating EE things for me is the Finland-Estonia-Hungary connection. They share a language group but Hungary is ten million km away from both Estonia and Finland. I guess it kinda makes sense they’d get involved into each other’s poo poo at some point.

Mokotow posted:

Was it simply no meat, or was there some kind of substitute?

Mokotow posted:

Was it simply no meat, or was there some kind of substitute?

jaete posted:

Somaen posted:

Well Hungary is building a bunch of them but afaik they're with Rosatom which might not be the optimal solution and will take until the late 2020s.

Good analysis on the insider trying to articulate the negotiating goals by Moscow being achieved in the gopnik mind games style/5D chess: https://theins.ru/opinions/pavel-luzin/248544

jaete posted:

I'm not a linguist, but I think both Finnish and Estonian are the last surviving members of (a certain branch of) Finno-Ugric languages, while Hungarian is a bit further away. Historically there were lots of languages in that language family, but over time people speaking Slavic languages ended up taking over those geographical areas, so that only a few (big) spots of Finno-Ugric are left. Estonia and Finland are both kinda remote and semi-isolated which makes sense in this context. There are also several tiny spots of almost-extinct Finno-Ugric languages, mainly in what is now Russia.

I saw a very interesting paper on some nerds trying to classify languages (i.e. creating a family tree of languages) on a computer, where they were looking at indo-European languages vs Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian, and concluding that Finnish and Estonian are in their own branch (or whatever) somewhere to the side, all indo-European languages are on the opposite side, and Hungarian is somewhere in the middle. This more or less agreed with the linguistic consensus; the paper was about using data compression as a programmatic clustering method, which is an interesting application (!) of Kolmogorov complexity.

Non-edit: to be clear re Hungarian, according to Wikipedia the common ancestor of both Finnish-Estonian-etc and Hungarian existed something like 3000 years ago, which is why those two branches are pretty distant. In the history since then (almost) everything else that was in that tree disappeared, and I don't think there has been very much large-scale interaction between Finland or Estonia and Hungary in the last 3000 years either, so the distance persists

Mokotow posted:

That’s a great write-up, I had no idea how these languages stack against each other. I guess this reminds me of the turkic language group on a smaller scale - there are spots of turkic stretching all the way to China, some of them fairly ancient and quite different from other, more modern branches.

Weyd posted:

I could have a base level conversation in Estonian with a finn speaking in Finnish and we'd understand each other for the most part. Hungarian, on the other hand, outside of some surface-level similarities, might as well be a moon language to me.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

That’s an incredibly long way to say “in case we’ve owned ourselves, we’ll try to make the best use of what already is offered, and maybe also do that thing which is entirely in our purview”.

quote:

Почему я про это вспомнил и так долго рассказывал? Потому что события, которые происходили со мной 30 лет назад, очень напоминают то, как Путин пытается развести Меркель. Путин пытается втянуть ее в бесконечный диалог, где при любых раскладах Путин окажется победителем. Как этот диалог выглядит на настоящий момент:
20 августа. Песков заявил, что в России будет проведено расследование, если подтвердится информация об отравлении Навального (https://meduza.io/news/2020/08/20/peskov-pozhelal-navalnomu-vyzdorovleniya-i-poobeschal-pomoch-s-ego-evakuatsiey-v-zarubezhnuyu-kliniku).
24 августа. Немецкая клиника Шарите заявила, что Навальный был отравлен (https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-53894273). Казалось бы, условие, которое ставил Песков 20 августа, выполнено. Нужно начинать расследование. Но на следующий день Кремль ставит новое условие:
25 августа. По словам Пескова, повода для расследования пока нет, так как неизвестно, воздействию какого вещества подвергся Навальный (https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-53903583).
Какой вывод должен сделать нормальный человек? По каким-то причинам для старта расследования нужно идентифицировать вещество. Как только станет понятно, чем отравили Навального, расследование тут же начнется.
2 сентября. Немецкие власти заявили, что Навальный был отравлен «Новичком», причем заявление было сделано на самом высшем уровне – канцлером ФРГ (https://www.rbc.ru/politics/02/09/2020/5f4fbc0e9a79470e60c60b3f). Начинает ли Кремль расследование, как обещал Песков 25 августа? Нет, не начинает. Следует череда новых требований и отговорок – создание совместного консилиума с российскими врачами (https://rg.ru/2020/09/05/roshal-predlozhil-nemeckim-vracham-sovmestno-izuchit-sostoianie-navalnogo.html), непредоставление данных России от Германии (https://www.rbc.ru/politics/11/09/2020/5f5a9bba9a7947ae551d1b82), если Навального и отравили, то не в России, а в Германии (https://www.rbc.ru/politics/02/09/2020/5f4fc4e49a794711d70ec368), следователям МВД нужно дать доступ к Навальному (https://www.znak.com/2020-09-11/v_mvd_poprosyat_germaniyu_dat_rossiyskim_sledovatelyam_dostup_k_navalnomu).

Мы видим, что требования Кремля растут как головы гидры. Стоит выполнить одно условие, как появляются другие. Эта игра без конца и края, и Меркель в ней не может победить, если следовать правилам, навязанным Путиным. Предположим, что Германия согласится пустить российских специалистов, чтобы они сами удостоверились в наличии «Новичка». Если им просто показать анализы, то ответ будет, скорее всего: «Мы не верим, покажите нам, как вы его нашли». Если Германия покажет (и тем самым нашим разработчикам химоружия уйдет ценная информация, в каком месте они прокололись), то всегда можно сказать: «Да, «Новичок» там есть. Но ведь его могли изготовить и не у нас, ведь его рецепт есть у стран НАТО» (https://www.interfax.ru/russia/724718). Как можно доказать, что «Новичок» приехал из России? Чисто теоретически немецкие специалисты могут приехать в Россию и обследовать все места, где был Навальный в то утро. И тут два сценария. Если они ничего не найдут (ведь у гбшников были три недели, чтобы почистить следы), то кремлевские скажут: «Ага…, вот видите, ничего у нас не нашли, значит, вы и отравили». Если же немецким специалистам удастся что-то найти, то опять включат пластинку: «А где гарантия, что вы не привезли с собой, ведь всем известно, что «Новичок» производится в странах НАТО». Если же немцы откажутся ехать в Россию (например, по соображениям собственной безопасности), то кремлевские скажут: «Ага…, вот видите, они не хотят ехать, хотя мы их и зовем. Значит, точно они подкинули». Если же Германия не пускает наших специалистов: «Вот видите, они не пускают наших специалистов, чтобы те все проверили, значит, им есть что скрывать». А если Германия не отвечает на бессмысленные запросы: «Вот видите, они сами отказываются отвечать на наши запросы, как мы можем возбудить дело?»

Гопник Путин пытается втянуть Меркель в этот бесконечный диалог, где он гарантировано выйдет победителем. Чем дальше ему удастся продвинуться в этом диалоге, тем больше у него будет козырей. На каждый ответ Германии можно задать десяток своих вопросов (по делу и не по делу), на каждый факт – выдвинуть десяток альтернативных объяснений. На каждый вывод, выдвинуть десяток сомнений. Гопника невозможно в чем-то убедить или что-то ему доказать. Он одновременно является и прокурором, и судьей. Степень убедительности вашего довода будет оценивать именно гопник, а не вы, если даже вам самим ваш довод кажется очень убедительным. И его цель – не найти правду, он ее и так знает.

Путин не первый раз применяет подобную тактику – втянуть партнеров в бесконечный диалог, чтобы посеять множество сомнений. Это было и в случае с малазийским боингом, и с отравлением Скрипалей, и в случае с Литвиненко. Это, пожалуй, первый раз, когда Запад, в частности Меркель, перестала вестись на гопнические разводки Путина. Мы видим, что после двух раундов («докажите, что он отравлен» и «скажите, каким веществом»), Германия просто решила игнорировать Путина и отправляет все данные в ОЗХО (Организация по запрещению химического оружия) и партнерам по «Большой семерке». Тратить время на бесконечные разговоры, в результате которого сам и окажешься виноват, видимо, никому больше не хочется.

Somaen posted:

Yeah basically, I don't know how to articulate the street thug style of intimidation and dynamic goal shifting familiar to Eastern Europeans but apparently completely novel to others ready to accept Security Concerns as an honest, legitimate demand and not a part of a mind game. Maxim Mironov wrote a funny piece on it before regarding Navalny's poisoning but I'm not sure it translates to english well, but it is absolutely bullseye in describing the negotiation tactic used by the Kremlin all the time and the origins of it

https://mmironov.livejournal.com/58713.html

The original insider article also notes that some uncomfortable topics can be "left in the past" as already accomplished like loss of sovereignty of Belarus which is something to keep in mind. Huilo might not get everything he wants but that doesn't mean he won't try to gently caress up at least someone and this can be just accepted quietly because the West is busy with preventing World War 3 and discussing clancy-scenario

Somaen posted:

Like right now Navalny is going through a kangaroo trial and about to be sentenced away for a decade but it's under the radar since everyone is too busy reading each twitch of Putin on video trying to guess does that mean he will attack or he won't attack

Randarkman posted:

Well the thing with the Turkic languages is that the major geographical expansion of that group happened pretty recently in history, only about 1000 years ago, and it was only really the one language/branch that did the expanding and then diverged into most of the big modern Turkic languages, which by large are actually still pretty drat similar to each other, enough that there is still a great deal of common ground, mostly complicated by stuff like different writing systems and foreign loan words more than the actual Turkic base of the languages.

OddObserver posted:

Hungarian migration was also only about 1100 years ago, but Finnish one seems to may have been way older than that (3000?) so yeah....

Ataxerxes posted:

The Finnish-Estonian-Hungarian connection has also appeared in a few pen-and-paper rpg's where it usually means that someone who knows Hungarian can get by in Finnish, which is very much not the case in real life. These games seem to have been written by people who speak neither.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

Random evening trivia, courtesy of our minister of foreign affairs.

https://twitter.com/edgarsrinkevics/status/1493456627890102273