Russians Do Love a Cuppa

sideways14a said:
Yeah it is a big question that "What should we do"?

IMHO, nothing ... thats the worst of all. Doing nowt while a bully runs all over causing havoc and throwing his weight around is absurd and will eventually come back to bite us - but what can the west actually get away with?

Well,
1 I would take the sanctions to the max - a bit like the old days east v's west. No one does business with them until Putin and his big stick are shoved where they belong. Thats not only for technology but gas, oil ect.. yes its going to cause us issues but its going to be a hard slog anyway.
2 Bolster the eastern European countries defensive and offensive power. Russia doesnt like nato being too close to them, so cautiously add more support to those countries trying to back away from Putin. This has to be carefully done, not just drop a **** tone of weapons and men there but done quietly.
3 Cut them off from the Internet. Ok not that easy but could be done. I dont like using the web as a battleground but it already is weaponized with so many hacks and problems from Russia and China already that just making it hard for those countries to take part in the global internet could be a big FU to there recent trouble causing crap dished out to many countries around the world.

Will the above get rid of Putin, prob not. Will it **** off his people (and china's too if need be) - ohh yes. I think the answer to bully's like Putin has to come from within there own country anyway.
Could it lead to war, yes but it prob wont - even a nutter like Putin wouldnt want an armed escalation over a few heavy sanctions and access to the internet properly. Putting more troops near the borders might so it would need a soft hand.

But politicians are saps and nothing will be done with this git. He and others like him will continue to act like total ass's while he gets away with ... murder...
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What did we do when Saudi murdered Khashoggi? What do we do when this kind of thing happens all around the world... from China to South America to Africa, they're all at it.

Putin might be fairly brazen but he's far from the only one misbehaving.

What did we do to Saudi? Answer, nothing. Maybe we sold them some extra planes or something.
 
Minusorange said:
If the intent was to kill him, then yes it has failed, or do you think Vlad would be like "When you get the chance could you maybe possibly kill this guy for me please ? Doesn't matter if you don't, just try okay?" to his minions ?

Makes Russia look incompetent if they keep trying to kill people but failing
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The guy's in a coma and may not survive if he does he may be disabled and he's unlikely to ever return to russia either way, so the end result is the same. The only surprising thing is they let him out of the country at all it means they simply don't care what the foreign audience thinks because the home audience will be told a different story and presumably they'll believe it.
 
I suspect the reason they let him out is they didn't expect the Germans to test for nerve agents, or they thought there wouldn't be enough to show up after he'd been "cared for" in the Russian hospital, there were reports that there were a lot of government security people wandering around, and they delayed any other doctors seeing him for as long as they could without raising every red flag.
I expect someone may have been meant to make sure he was thoroughly decontaminated but missed something or the German test was simply more sensitive than expected, and may not have expected foreign doctors to fly in as fast as they did.

It does make you wonder how many other Russian oligarchs and political opponents who died of things like heart attacks or strokes were in fact poisoned, especially inside Russia - in London they seemed to be happy with "falling out of the window", but I guess Canterbury didn't have many high rises he visits, and he didn't live in a 10th floor luxury apartment.
 
Russia allegedly poison someone and the media (and therefore people) never stop banging on about it, meanwhile China, is throwing thousands of people into camps and nobody really cares. They also allowed a virus to spread that has wreaked havoc on the worlds economy but oh no some Russian who doesn't like Putin died in suspicion circumstances this deserves our full undivided attention.... Look over there....
 
FoxEye said:
What did we do when Saudi murdered Khashoggi? What do we do when this kind of thing happens all around the world... from China to South America to Africa, they're all at it.

Putin might be fairly brazen but he's far from the only one misbehaving.

What did we do to Saudi? Answer, nothing. Maybe we sold them some extra planes or something.
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Actually we have sanctioned some Saudis and some Russians, recently under this government. Yes we should do more IMO and hopefully we back up Germany who in this instance are the weak man of Europe needing the Russian gas pipeline. We have been taking less than two percent Russian gas, half comes from our North Sea supply and a good chunk from Norwegian fields.
 
People can and do talk about the Uighur in China, if you've paid any attention to the likes of the BBC they've been covering it every time some new information has come out, and in case you had your head in the sand, China were trying hard to stop the virus - the sealed of major population centres and had it quite under control until various western countries basically ignored the signs of what was going on and then didn't lock down, or even do basic screening for incoming nationals (the US was appalling for that, funnelling all their incoming nationals through one massively crowded airport where they were stuck together in conditions that made Comic Con look empty for in many cases 6-10 hours).
IIRC even BBC "Click" have covered the Urghur's, not to mention from memory a couple of long standalone specials, and the general news.

The reason Putin poisoning someone with a nerve agent makes headline news is that it's highly visible and he's done it before with no regard for national borders or who else gets hurt - it's a targeted political assassination done in front of the worlds media vs in a situation where it's hard to even get a hint of what's going on because it's deep inside a country that can and does control it's own media, let alone where foreign nationals and media go.
 
It does help Putin to be so brazen about going around attacking people who upset him when the US is unlikely to do anything about it as things stand.
 
mmj_uk said:
Russia allegedly poison someone and the media (and therefore people) never stop banging on about it, meanwhile China, is throwing thousands of people into camps and nobody really cares. They also allowed a virus to spread that has wreaked havoc on the worlds economy but oh no some Russian who doesn't like Putin died in suspicion circumstances this deserves our full undivided attention.... Look over there....
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China have been given the green light by Trump for their Uighur camps. Without the US involved everyone else's possible ideas for sanctions etc are worthless, they should be condemned and shamed or hit financially or both to end it. China were slow letting the world know as they tried to contain it but lets not pretend it was fully containable long run. Is it being contained in places like the US, Brazil, India, Russia? Was it contained in Italy, Spain, UK? No it wasn''t. And WHO were warning of it in January, if governments didn't take those warnings seriously more fool them. And finally this isn't a one off with Putin. He has a long history of murdering or imprisoning all his political rivals, any journalists who displease him and even those who displease him abroad, he's murdered on 2 different occasions on British soil now with a radioactive agent and an nerve agent. Yes other nations do heinous things and they should all be treated as pariahs.
 
During my entire life, 1952 - ,Russia has been the bogeyman. Quite properly IMO, but during the cold war if they offed someone, likely he would be on the opposing team and little was ever heard of the black ops on others soil by either.

Now Putin is quite brazen and considers it a learning experience 'pour encourager les autres'. He does not need to travel to the west and has little requirement to do so. However as much as possible should be done to disrupt his program, above or below the surface.
 
mmj_uk said:
Russia allegedly poison someone and the media (and therefore people) never stop banging on about it, meanwhile China, is throwing thousands of people into camps and nobody really cares. They also allowed a virus to spread that has wreaked havoc on the worlds economy but oh no some Russian who doesn't like Putin died in suspicion circumstances this deserves our full undivided attention.... Look over there....
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Pretty sure Russia has its own murky history with detention camps theres rumours of horrible things going on Chechnya for example that leak out from time to time but there hasn't been an awful lot of attention paid to that either.

But targeted political assasinations on foreign soil, and one of our own nationals died as a result of the sheer recklessness of it throwing the half used bottle into a skip not even caring to cover their tracks... thats something else if the Chinese were doing that I'm pretty sure there'd be an uproar too.
 
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