Russia-Ukraine war and related tensions Megathread

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https://twitter.com/MarQs__/status/1476690422927929344?s=20

That tweet got deleted fast.

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Not sure if it's the right place for this but this Lithuanian MP is spitting pure facts

https://mobile.twitter.com/MatasMaldeikis/status/1485569942023983109

And in the late 1200s, it was under Mongolian control, but I'm not sure the relevance.

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It seems very unlikely that Hungary would allow Ukraine to join NATO any time soon, so what's the big deal?

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It seems very unlikely that Hungary would allow Ukraine to join NATO any time soon, so what's the big deal?

It's always one election away from a new policy. The next one is this April.

OK, maybe. But I really don't think Orban is the only NATO leader opposed to it. He's just more obvious than the others.

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why do putin gotta be such a little bitch

Yeltsin was our bitch, and he ended up with something like a 2% approval rating.

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I think Pope Francis is the best person to mediate.

There are very few Catholics in either of these countries though

Maybe that allows the pope to be more neutral.

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Oh wow, another fake CIA talking point.

Yawn.

They're claiming 1AM UK time, so another 75 minutes before your yawn.

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Then the Russians may well do the opposite. They can't prove Biden right, can they?

Putin isn't quite that big of a troll.

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If I were Zelensky I'd be doing everything in my power to get my hands on nukes as quickly as possible.

Even North Korea probably isn't crazy enough to sell a nuke. They might take your money and not deliver anything though.

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Traffic conditions at the border by Kharkiv.

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Russia has no allies other than Belarus. China and Russia are friendly, but they are not allies. At the worst it would be a regional European war.

Kazakhstan isn't an ally?

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Ukraine's interior ministry apparently confirms a naval invasion of Odessa.

https://mobile.twitter.com/MattMcBradley/status/1496696293279817728

If they're going for Odessa, there's a good chance they invade the whole coastline.

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Does Ukraine have any sort of WMD’s or no

They aren’t Iraq smh.

Iraq, Ukraine, and Libya all had WMD and gave them up.

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https://twitter.com/cristivlas/status/1496710102195314691

Hopefully this means Moldova is not in fact under attack!!!

That is just the Russian puppet state along the Ukraine border, so it doesn't sound like Moldova isn't losing any more territory since 1991. However, if Russia was going to invade 2 more former Soviet republics, it would be them and Georgia.

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CNN reporting ground attacks coming from Belarus into Ukraine

That's Yushchenko territory. I don't think the orange areas are going to be very friendly to Russian occupation.

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https://twitter.com/HayesBrown/status/1496710912648044548

I guess it could work if you had a vote like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembly_Resolution_2758

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https://twitter.com/DAlperovitch/status/1496740935522451457

So looking further at the Tweet sounds like "Geo-Location Gurus" might have been able to actually map to location?

Would love to see this confirmed doing a comparison of geography and plus the exact coordinates if true.

Earlier this evening posted about surprised that Russian Armored Convoys weren't moving towards Kharkiv in the event of a full scale invasion, but maybe they were just softening key targets up before bringing the heavy armor across the borders.

I think as far back as a week or so ago the understanding was that the first salvo would be all strategic bombing, long-range artillery, and cyberattacks, then the tanks would start rolling in once Russia had air supremacy. That indeed seems to be what's going on, although it looks like getting air supremacy was a matter of two or three hours rather than two or three days.

I'm sure Russia had a lot of missiles and air force bases within range, so that has helped speed things up.

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The RTS, the main index of Moscow's stock exchange, is down 49% so far.

The Ruble is at a record low, but is stabilizing due to Central Bank intervention. Putin had built up ample reserves of forex and gold since 2014, but some of that is held in hostile western countries.

It's down 59% for the week.

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https://mobile.twitter.com/OSINT_Ukraine/status/1497100193283686402

Ukraine has launched a ballistic missile into an airbase in Russia. 🇺🇦💪

It's not every day that there's a direct attack on a nuclear power from another country. Sure there was the Falkland Islands, India and Pakistan fighting over some glacier, some wars of independence like Algeria, but none of those were really attacks on the mainland of the country.

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-crisis-mp-interview-ak-47-112600107.html

Former Ukrainian president from 2014-2019 takes to the streets of Kyiv to fight the Russians

Wow I hope he’s alright

Imagine any of America's billionaires doing this. Poroshekno is wealthy enough he could have left on a private jet and be in the Caymans already.

Russia probably thought they'd be cowards like Ashraf Ghani.

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Bloomberg reports that Wall Street firms including JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc are telling the Biden administration to not take Russia off SWIFT saying that doing so will have far-reaching fallout that could hurt the global economy.

What the Bloomberg report does not say is that getting Russia off SWIFT might accelerate PRC-Russia plans for de-dollarization.   Europe would not care about this as much but the USA will care a lot.

China and Russia don't do well in terms of their currency being traded a lot. China loses to Switzerland and almost loses to Hong Kong. And Russia is much lower than that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Most_traded_currencies

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The sheer numbers of casualties so far, especially on the Russian side, have been astonishingly violent for this type of war. The waste of life on a tyrant's post-imperial brooding...

For some reason the UK has lower estimates.

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Reading this thread is like stepping in a parallel universe where Ukraine is winning the war, except IRL Kiev might be taken tonight, 2 days after the war started. I understand you're all cheerleading for one side, but you should at least read some of the Tweets you're posting and realize that they actually reveal what dire straits Ukraine is in, like the post about the TV program showing how to make Molotov cocktails and the video of Zelensky on the street in Kiev vowing to fight to the end and saying how we may not see him again.

I generally agree with this sentiment-- believing wartime propaganda is dumb-- but I also don't think the war comes down to just Kiev, especially if Zelensky escapes capture/death. The Ukrainian government could establish temporary operations in Lviv and organize from there. Kiev just happens to be in a really poorly defended position compared to some of Ukraine's other cities.

Ukraine sort of had a government in  exile from 1920-1992.

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https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/1497368313873133570

Putin is probably like "I JUST CRUSHED THE PROTESTERS FOR YOU, YOU UNGRATEFUL PUPPET"

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Putin is a pussy, why doesn't he go out and 1v1 with Zelenskyy

he'll get his ass beat

Speaking of chickenhawks, Dubya seems to have changed his mind on Putin's soul.