This is just something their PR team put together to get some good publicity. Like paying media to rename the "BP oil spill" to "Deepwater oil spill". Like branding their company as a green eco-friendly after said BP oil spill. Still one of the largest oil companies in the world, but they are green eco-friendly.
Source? I did some rudimentary checking and what you're describing seems like revisionist history and/or conspiracy to me. I checked the news section from wikipedia on that date[1], and it's referred to as "Explosion on Deepwater Horizon drilling rig", with no references to BP (in the title, there are references in the body). The linked sources also do the same. The same lack of BP reference also applies to NPR which had stories from the AP[2] as well as new orleans public radio[3]. Maybe BP bribed all of them, but that seems hard to believe. Looking at the wikipedia page and/or news articles, you can find a less sinister explanation for why it wasn't called the BP oil spill: the drilling rig was owned and operated by Transocean, not BP.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events/April_...
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20100421145719/https://www.npr.o...
[3] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126183...
"In September 2014, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that BP was primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct. In April 2016, BP agreed to pay $20.8 billion in fines, the largest corporate settlement in United States history."
[1] https://www.britannica.com/event/Deepwater-Horizon-oil-spill
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill
Right, but "leased" in this context is closer to "leasing" a taxi than "leasing" a car. Transocean was described as the operator in news reports as well as on wikipedia. Also, most staff on the rig were not BP:
"A total of 126 workers were aboard. Seventy-nine were Transocean workers, six were BP employees and 41 were contracted."
>"In September 2014, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that BP was primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct. In April 2016, BP agreed to pay $20.8 billion in fines, the largest corporate settlement in United States history."
I'm not disputing BP's involvement/responsibility, just that it's at least somewhat justifiable to call it the "deepwater horizon oil spill" rather than the "bp oil spill", especially as the story was developing.
Also, looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_accidents, it seems pretty common to call energy accidents based on the plant/ship name, rather than the company name. For instance, we refer to "Three Mile Island accident", not the "EnergySolutions (the operator) nuclear disaster". The Exxon Valdez oil spil was a notable exception, but that's because the oil tanker was literally named "Exxon Valdez".
How much did transocean have to pay?
The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (also referred to as the "BP oil spill")
I think you're missing the point. That fragment being present in the wikipedia article just means... wikipedia recognizes that some people also refer to the incident as the "BP oil spill". I have no problem with people wanting it to call it the "BP oil spill". It might even be the correct term. After all, in the final judgement BP was found 67% responsible. What I do have a problem with is the parent post's accusation that BP paid "media" to 'rename the "BP oil spill" to "Deepwater oil spill"' for "good publicity" reasons. That's not supported by the evidence because news coverage referred to it as "Deepwater oil spill" and not "BP oil spill" from day 1, and that it's pretty common to not mention the company name in energy related accidents (see my other comment).
> Like paying media to rename the "BP oil spill" to "Deepwater oil spill".
That would fall beyond the purview of PR and squarely into bribery, and there's no evidence that it happened.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
>Why does HN care so much about BPs image that they must clear it of any potential bribery claims?
You see nothing wrong with uncritically accepting any accusation of corporate wrongdoing? Is the truth not important to you?
Hmm, this seems to support my claims, since shilling isn't allowed.
> You see nothing wrong with uncritically accepting any accusation of corporate wrongdoing? Is the truth not important to you?
Going from not caring about BP's image to not caring about the truth is a pretty far jump wouldn't you say? Most people would not care so much about a corporation's image to defend it as much as it's being defended here, unless they have some obligation to or other connection to said corporation.
Banks of course can pad their balance sheets with this stuff, so I guess that side is seized.
Edit: Oh unless we actually are corrupt, and we don't actually carry out the unexplained wealth orders. Notably, the British government hasn't carried out any.
Dunno what happened behind the scenes with the naming, but I'd say most people in my area associated it strongly with BP and am pretty confident that BP was implicated on the NPR radio station I listened to.
[0] https://twitter.com/Barnes_Joe/status/1497194009038626842
This has been clear for quite some time now, but Germany chose to move in the opposite direction by shutting down its nuclear plants. As long as Russian energy remains cheap, I expect that that Central Europeans will continue to vote with their wallets after the current crisis blows over.
Germany to push ahead with two LNG terminals to reduce Russian gas dependence: Scholz https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
Things are changing these last few days faster than I can keep up; perhaps this actually will be a historical inflection point.
Switching wholesale from existing gas heating is not a trivial exercise though.
Given their recent about-face on several key positions, I am hopeful that they revisit their position on nuclear. Renewables should of course be prioritised, but until mass storage becomes realistic, reliable electricity generation needs to be available. Now that it is clear that Russia cannot be trusted as a reliable source of cheap energy, I hope Germany takes energy independence much more seriously.
Because electricity was not cheap and plentiful. There are three plants still in operation in Germany, with 10 having closed in the last decade. France has 56 currently in operation, with more planned. This is not a problem which occurred overnight for Germany. They've been focusing on LPG for heating for decades. They made the wrong call; in large part because of the polling for German citizens. Most are against nuclear electricity generation.
The economics for migrating from Russian sources is already there. You're already losing money with coal plants, and natural gas will soon be more expensive to keep running than replace. Storage/level generation is a secondary concern, but as stated the extant nuke plants coudl do that.
Will they be replaced by battery powered electric ones? I don't think so.
What then? LNG-powered trucks?
Methanol fuelcell powered?
For short-distance delivery, battery-powered electric trucks probably work fine—battery-powered forklifts have been common inside factories since well into the previous millennium, EVs' regenerative braking dramatically improves energy efficiency in city driving, the high peak power density and rapid slew rate that was such a selling point for the Tesla Roadster is another big plus over diesel, and if necessary fleet organizations can swap batteries daily in ways that would be unacceptably risky for Teamster OOs who could get stuck with a dud battery.
For fast shipping, Fischer–Tropsch Jet A-1.
Sea shipping is a somewhat tougher problem; obviously it's feasible to do with 99% renewable energy, as it was for all of human history until 250 years ago, but today's depreciation rates, geographical specialization and long multinational supply chains, and JIT practices strongly incentivize the much higher power densities of modern shipping. And the cost premium for Fischer–Tropsch diesel over modern bunker fuel is much larger than what truckers and diesel locomotives face.
Fortunately, though very dirty, sea shipping is a tiny fraction of the overall energy mix.
Fischer-Tropsch with which kind of carbon/hydrogen sources? Hydrogen from electrolysis?
Fischer-Tropsch diesel would allow continued use of existing trucks until their EOL.
> ... Maybe methanol-powered trucks or CNG-powered trucks ...
My guess is that it'll be the liquid (or liquefied; not hydrogen though) fuel that is most universally applicable (different regions of the world with different temperatures, different uses in industries) that will prevail. Might even be Ammonia because it doesn't require a carbon source to be synthesized.
> For short-distance delivery, battery-powered electric trucks probably work fine ...
I kind of see the point that for short distances BEV have a strong position. But on the other hand my reasoning for that to be somewhat temporary would be: in the long rong, there needs to be some liquid fuel that gets used for long distance. As soon as this liquid fuel becomes cheap enough to be competitive, it will have a huge advantage over BEV that might then chew off even the short distance applications of BEV. If some liquid fuel were to become cheap enough then it'd be dramatically more flexible to refuel than BEV. Just fill up the tank, it's quick and simple tech. No need to structure your day that's busy (managing work and private life) around charging a vehicle. Also compared to maintaining the charching infrastructure and balancing the load of an electric grid, it's soo much less complex because liquid fuels come with robust load buffering built in.
becuase the post adds nothing and is simply a post for the sake of posting.
Combine that with the apparent intense Ukrainian morale and Russian military incompetence/lack of will, Ukraine winning is not entirely out of the question. Even if they lose they seem fully prepared to commit to an insurgency, which given said international support and direct borders with NATO would be the best equipped insurgency in history.
Never mind the potential effects of the sanctions, which are truly massive in scope.
Ukraine could very well be the rock that breaks Russia's teeth.
And given the relative weakness demonstrated by the west in recent history (such as abandoning Afghanistan) they might judge that in the end, the rest of world won't have the stomach for any costly intervention.
Sending the weapons to Ukraine amounts to little, in the face of overwhelming Russian military advantage. Given the likely goal of establishing pro-Russian government in Ukraine, and the long history of association, Russian forces are being rather "gentle" compared to what they demonstrated elsewhere, but if it comes to it... Ukraine cannot win without real support (as in boots on the ground) from the west, and nobody wants to contemplate that.
The difference in number of troops isn't as important as it seems numerically if the Russian morale and training is as low as it seems it might be based on reports on western media (which could be iffy).
The difference in equipment isn't as important if it can't make it into Ukraine. Here's where anti-air and anti-tank weapons make a big difference. So far, it seems like Russia hasn't been able to take control of airfields, and anti-air weapons help contest air superiority. Russia also seems to have trouble with supply lines, anti-tank weapons work against tanks as well as armored transport vehicles.
Urkaine has an easier job here, repelling an occupation is easier than waging one. If they keep high morale and continue to have access to effective weaponry, this is going to be costly for Russia's military. (As it was for Russia and the US in Afghanistan)
Perhaps Russia is playing soft, and will turn up the heat, but perhaps they miscalculated with regard to what they could achieve.
As for the Russian Oliagarchs, if their concern was eventual revolution in Russia it looks like they may have just brought that day closer rather than pushed it out. They clearly weren't expecting a response of this magnitude, the question is when they choose to cut their losses.
Northern Cyprus has been in a limbo since the 1970s.
But I agree that nobody wants to contemplate "real support"/boots-on-the-ground for Ukraine. But that is precisely what the west via NATO will have to do. The outcome of the current war is as much an existential threat to NATO (and to a lesser extent the EU) as it is to Putin's leadership.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Afghanistan_(1978%E...
- holding out long enough, if it depleets Russia of resources ( aided with sanctions)
- internal protests in Russia ( considering huge amount of relatives on both sides), that goes out of control - I don't know if this is realistic though. But I think the relative factor between those countries ( family members) can outwit the propaganda factor
Those Ukranians are though as hell though. I'm sure we are seeing a more 'positive' side of them ( if that's possible in a war), but they aren't backing down. Uttermost respect for their president too. He seems to have a deep understanding of how he can reach the world.
My friend in college was a son of Polish dissidents. He didn't like to talk about it in too much depth but I got some impressions, and it sounds like his granddad was one of those people in the movie they made recently about the Polish resistance hiding in the woods during the Cold War.
For clarity, and despite Macron's urgings, the EU doesn't yet have an air force it can send anywhere.
It does have the Common Security and Defence Policy[0]:
"The CSDP involves the deployment of military or civilian missions to preserve peace, prevent conflict and strengthen international security in accordance with the principles of the United Nations Charter. Military missions are carried out by EU forces established with secondments from the member states' armed forces"
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Security_and_Defence_Po...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-close-airspace-russi...
[2] https://www.barrons.com/news/eu-countries-to-send-fighter-je...
I can't speak to the state of Russian air superiority at the moment, it could be that there are gaps/The Ukrainian air force hasn't been destroyed yet.
But even if as an idea it doesn't work out, the fact that the "peace project" organization, whose members visibly wept over the UK leaving, is coordinating the delivery of military hardware to a non-member for use in an active conflict should speak volumes about the level of support Ukraine is getting.
You're proposing military aircraft owned by an EU member state should launch from their airfields in EU, sneak over the border and land in Ukraine, refuel and (re-)arm - and perhaps get a quick paint job too and have the aviation equivalent of their serial numbers filed off - then start attacking Russian forces in Ukraine, and our plan would be basically to hope that the enemy with apparently complete air superiority plus satellite capability might not notice?
I'm firmly anti-war; that plan sounds like a great way to drag the EU and/or NATO straight into this one.
It was the EU "High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy" speaking for various EU members.
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-ukrai...
The only two ways Russia can stop this process are by executing a full retreat or using nuclear weapons. Failing either of those, Russia will run out of soldiers before the rest of us run out of arms and ammunition. They will not -- cannot -- be allowed to win, and the rest of the civilized world will make certain that they don't.
Glory to Ukraine!
America is the greatest force for freedom in the world and I’m putting my money where my mouth is.
But Russia is going to conquer Ukraine, which is substantially larger, has a bigger population, a more heavily armed population, and - arguably - the world's 4th best military?? Plus Ukraine has full support from the entire advanced world beside Brazil, India, and China. And Russia has the support of only Belarus - which has a military budget smaller than the military aid the US has sent Ukraine in the last 2 weeks...
This is an unwinnable war.
Leave it to the Soviet Union to bankrupt themselves...
Afghanistan is also very different story than Ukraine. First there is the question of logistics. 75% of the terrain is mountainous and 50% of the country has elevation greater than 6500 ft [1]. This makes it quite the challenge for any would be invaders. Compare that to Ukraine where only 5% of the country is [2], and is also a lot closer to Russian center of power.
I do hope that with what support Ukraine is getting will enable them to give bloody enough nose to Russians that they decide it's not worth it. But given the thinly veiled threat to use nuclear weapons, I fear things will get worse, not better. And before someone says that Mr. Putin is not crazy enough to escalate that far, most people thought he wouldn't actually attack in the first place, and threatening with nuclear weapons can only be seen as an act of weakness, coming out of desperation, and desperate people do desperate things.
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-moun... [2] https://www.britannica.com/place/Ukraine
Everyone's savings have been destroyed and they had to hike rates to 20%.
Russia didn't even open the stock market for trading so that is just going to make things worse.
Cutting them off from SWIFT means banks are practically useless. The whole economy is basically in a free fall right now.
UK Pension funds will be hit as they tend to invest in the "blue chip" stocks so alot of people planning on retiring might be drawn back into the workforce against their will.
Natural gas would be preferable to fracking gas, but I guess political reasons will top environmental ones.
We could also change to electric heating and burn lignite again of course.
So it depends if they're talking about a total write-off, or a write-off.
I think the misunderstanding comes from the fact that in everyday parlance, "write-off" often means a complete 100% loss (for example, my car was totaled, and it's a write-off). But in accounting, it does not.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/russian-cbank-confi...
As such I have to respect them whether they are doing it as a game playing move, or a moral move.
The events of the last few days make it at least plausible that Putin's days are numbered. If so, that's very bad in terms of absolute apocalyptic risk, but probably a good thing as measured by expected outcome. The chances of getting a stable democracy in the next decade might be, I dunno, 40% or greater (and those of dying in a nuclear fireball surely under 1%, right?). So as geopolitics it's probably a mistake, but as investment decisionmaking I think it makes sense.
i see the history of the last 30+ years as clear indication that Russian society is progressively becoming less and less able to manage large issues. As result i think there is high probability that Russia will breakup after that catastrophe of Ukraine war similar to USSR after Afghanistan (the key to such breakup isn't external forces, instead it is clear disillusionment with existing power). For example, the Far East in particular has no good connection to Russia (and Putin was basically trying to buy them up by sending money which will definitely become problematic once the war related bills, like compensation to Ukraine, start to hit the treasure) while say getting high-speed rail Vladivostok-Dalyan/Bejing would include it into the Pacific ring of the future boom of economic development.
Russian may want democracy (though do we know that they do?), but there’s more than just Putin in the way.
For that matter, a number of Soviet successor states are successfully functioning democracies.
There are no differences between them in foreign affairs. Both favor wage suppression policies. Both favor currency manipulation to suppress consumption in order to help exporters. None of them is doing anything about the worst housing crisis in the world, leading to a demographic suicide of the country - fertility rate is below 1.3 for 20 years and counting. In many way, it's a choice between Pepsi and Coca-cola
Before the KMT lost power I think it was reasonable to see Taiwan as a one party state, but no longer. You are a little ambiguous in the "two countries" do things, but I guess you mean Korea and Taiwan. Yeah, both countries are not paradises that have solved all issues, but they keep improving their freedom, industrial bases, and living standards for the average person. Is that true for the us - we should aspire to do that. Instead we have people arguing on school boards whether books that dare to discuss slavery or jim crow laws should be discussed at all. We aren't clearly moving to be a better society with that kind of stuff.
Given that this is hardly unique to the US, I think Russia is reaping the whirlwind: they've been up to this sort of thing pretty much everywhere. This is not the WWIII. They have been waging the WWIII already, this whole time, in relatively novel ways, with a lot of success… until now.
And it's been the kind of success that is short-sighted: got their way again and again at the cost of building enormous hostility, which is now rebounding upon them. Russia made this bed and all of this is not that much of a surprise, really.
The Republican Party has been the safe harbor for christian and white supremacists beginning with Reagan and the moral majority. The love of violence, "I got mine" attitudes, gleeful wastefulness, etc have been American ills long before ~2010s era Russian misinfo campaigns.
Also, speaking as an American who has had their worldview impacted by living in Europe for a while, it is beyond pathetic for liberal Americans to tell the world "Don't worry we aren't crazy! The Russians made us do the bad stuff!". As the richest country in the world, we have to take accountability.
I think more seriously the US is a limited democracy because neither party really works for the people. They both work for the donors, one just a lot more and transparent than the other.
They're terrorists because they don't want to give the government absolute power? You're doing the same thing Republicans did to Middle Eastern countries in past decades, abuse the shit out of them then call them terrorists when they try to defend themselves.
It might be similar in Russia, though I’d imagine the heavily entrenched establishment, with massive reliance on various police forces, lends itself less to rapid democratisation-though you never know.
My personal opinion, South Korea deserves a big asterisk. They had a president that was trapped in a cult, and the large conglomerates still decide a lot.
Taiwan is #11 on the list, that is higher than the US and UK (obviously), and one spot ahead of Switzerland. If Taiwan was in Europe it would still be among the most democratic countries.
Sure it has flaws, but so does almost every country on the list. Heck, I'm Norwegian and Norway is #1 but I think it still has flaws. My main beef is some technicality called sperregrense, basically if your party is less than 4% it will get less representation than it deserves. This quite often decides the coalition in charge depending on which parties ends up at 3.9 or 4.0.
According to the Democracy Index, ~75 countries are full or flawed democracies, so 75 countries made the leap.
In fact in the UK it’s probably hard to pinpoint where real monarchy ended and democracy started. The monarch had less and less power over time, and an increasingly wide circle of privileged voters held more and more power.
Many struggling democracies had to make that leap much more quickly and often the failures of democracy are to do with the cultural remains of the previous systems.
I would put it more or less around Oliver Cromwell's tenure, even though the monarchy enjoyed some resurgence in power after the monarchy was restored it was short lived and the threat of parliament removing an unruly monarch, as they had done fairly decisively, became a real constraint on their power.
The struggles around that were also significant inspirations to French and American revolutions that followed.
Whether people approve or disapprove of Putin, a lot of them remember what life was like before he became Tsar-for-life, and it isn't something that most of them want to tangle with again.
And that proved to be one of the most disastrous decades in Russian history (I think only surpassed by the 1940s that saw them getting invaded by Hitler), so democracy doesn't have too much solid ground to stand on when it comes to Russia.
That's beautifully put, so concise.
Citation needed. I believe Putin enjoys a very strong approval in Russia and I have never read or see anything that could disprove it (except from self styled experts that are notoriously clueless about everything).
For a comparison there were just hundreds of protestors in Moscow on a 12 millions pop. This is nothing.
I visited quite a few Russian blogs with the help of a translation plugin, I didn't see anything looking like they disapprove, on the contrary most of them ask why it took 8 years.
Not only arrested. Beaten up and treated with electro shocks. Putin's Russia is not about humanity.
But my favorite search engine immediately brings up these ones:
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-moscow-navalny-protests-polic...
https://www.ifj.org/media-centre/news/detail/category/press-...
https://freedomnews.org.uk/2018/02/13/russia-arrested-antifa...
They are a couple of years old, but that things would have changed for the better in Russia does not sound likely, all reports are talking of the opposite.
There are also many reports about systematic rape in Russian prisons. Committed by inmates who are forced by the guards in exchange for less inhuman treatment.
Search for Nawalny's reports how is being treated if you still have not enough. Of course he gets carefully selected treatment because they know that the international press is reporting. But still it's a country where not only the leader is a brutal criminal.
A lot is stopping most people.
First you need somewhat objective information what is happening. A vast majority of the population does not have that. All independent voices have silenced, except if you are a political activist and know what to search for.
Then you need to take significant risk to commit crimes. As a small saboteur they won't have Novichok for you, but Russian prisons are very close to systematic torture. Especially for prisoners with a political background.
Last August "only" 61% approved his politics, mainly because of the masses getting poorer and large failure to fight the pandemic.
While 61% would be a good figure for most Western politicians, it was obviously a worrying trend for Putin. So he changed the agenda from a domestic one to a war. In January while he was still threatening support had indeed gone up to 69%.
Whether it is possible to get and publish any trustworthy polls in the current situation I don't know. After all the words attack and war are censored in Russian media, protesting against the war is illegal. They only have a special operation...
I (try to) look at the world like it is, not like I want it to be. Thinking that Putin days are numbered (be it by the people or his security apparatus) is delusional. If it is not, then back it up with something, I have no problem correcting my views when confronted with good data.
An autocrat who routinely imprisons and murders his critics does not inspire honest opinions to be shared by his people.
His approval rating is as genuine as his 146% election victories https://bloknot.ru/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/rostovsakaya-1...
I don't see too many organizations interested at the moment. Chinese would be the most likely candidates but they may also be wary and stay away for the time being. Or they can pretty much give their shares away to the Russian government or sell them to some Russian organization at a massive discount.
Energy is everything. We effectively convert hydrocarbons to calories. We ship everything with hydrocarbons. Real costs for every good and service will blow up alongside preexisting inflation. Food shortages aren’t just an inconvenience.
Societies don’t do well when these kinds of shocks happen. It’s not enough to contextualization it against the third world. When you’ve had it good and you don’t have it good anymore, that means chaos.
Wearing heated clothing instead of heating the indoors could cut down natural gas consumption by close to 40% - https://www.odyssee-mure.eu/publications/efficiency-by-secto....
Close to 4% of natural gas is used for cooking and heating water - which the EU could easily replace with electric using a subsidy (well worth it regardless).
The EU consumed ~379B cubic feet of natural gas in 2021. Shutting down just the German nuclear reactors is the equivalent of ~14B cubic feet = ~4% of natural gas consumption for the entire EU.
Gasoline consumption for personal (passenger) vehicles and flights uses more than 30% of the EU's oil consumption: https://www.google.com/amp/s/theconversation.com/amp/how-ele...
OPEC could easily pump enough oil, and the US & Canada ship enough LNG to replace 10% (or more) of the missing oil and gas.
It would be a major inconvenience - not an apocalypse, definitely not starvation. The EU is rich.
Round trip from US / Canada is less than 1 month.
(.163922÷.73×15×365÷24)÷379 = ~13.5% of Europe's natural gas consumption.
Mozah carrier 163,922 tons LNG.
1B cubic meters of NG = .73M tons LNG.
EU used 379B tons of NG in 2021.
Round trip from Germany to Canada with loading and unloading is ~24 days.
Realistically, it would probably make most sense to ship from the gulf for the US. So the travel time would be longer.
It takes 3+ years to build a container ship. There are 12 under construction in China right now - these all carry about 40% more than Mozah.
People just want cheap prices for gas, oil... We don't care too much about what happens in Ukraine, we just want to pay our bills. Nobody is going to be cold or hungry just to harm Russia. Capitalism wouldn't exist otherwise, and capitalism is just what the EU is about.
Edit - one more thing, Russia said it threatens us if NATO is right next door to us in Ukraine. So Russia wants to take over Ukraine, and they'll be right next door to NATO in Poland. They were already right next door to NATO.
They wanted some guarantee that Ukraine would remain a neutral country, and the response they got was that Ukraine was going to join NATO. Even more, NATO's secretary general said not only Ukraine can join NATO, but also, NATO's presence in eastern Europe was to be strengthened. If that was meant to avoid a military conflict, I think they were very wrong.
No, its not. Its against standards outside of the Washington Treaty that some member countries have suggested for membership, specifically to justify delaying the membership process for Ukraine and Georgia.
The present invasion seems to have shifted EU/NATO opinion among governments against Russia and toward Ukraine (and other states under Russian threat), perhaps most significantly in the places that have been most friendly to Russia and reluctant to support the countries they are threatening (Orbán’s Hungary, for instance), so that non-rule excuse may or may not continue to be operative.
Moreover, nobody asked Crimean nations anything. They are shot or moved to Siberia.
And I have bad news for Dumbass: Russia annexed Dumbass and eliminated independent Dumbassian nation.
Well, they voted in a 2014 referendum.
He has been quite clear about his desire to invade and subjugate countries to re-create the Tsarist empire.
You are spamming quite a lot, with a lot of bias. Your username smells like a bot.