WWIII

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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/uk/article4360260.ece

Russian tactics ‘could explode into full war with Nato’

Deborah Haynes Defence Editor
Published 1 minute ago
Tensions with Russia could spill over into all-out conflict that would pose an “existential threat to our whole being”, Britain’s top military commander in Nato warned today.
General Sir Adrian Bradshaw said President Putin could use ambiguous warfare and classic Soviet-style brinkmanship to seize Nato territory and change Europe’s borders.
“The threat from Russia and the risk it brings of a miscalculation resulting in a strategic conflict, however unlikely we see it as being right now, represents an existential threat to our whole being,” General Bradshaw, the deputy supreme allied commander Europe, said.
The warning, made in a speech at the Royal United Services Institute, follow remarks from Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, about the threat to European stability posed by an emboldened Russia in the wake of the crisis in Ukraine.
General Bradshaw, a former director of British special forces, said that a new strategy being used by the Kremlin posed two particular dangers.
The first was so-called hybrid warfare, using un-uniformed soldiers of unknown nationality backed by pro-Russian propaganda on television, radio and over the internet to distort reality and make it harder for Western governments to know who is calling the shots.
“The resulting ambiguity [makes] collective decisions relating to the appropriate responses more difficult,” General Bradshaw said.
He was referring to the need for all 28 Nato members to act collectively before any decision can be taken by the alliance – a core principal of Nato. If certain countries are not convinced of a particular, ambiguous threat, they might not support action to counter the danger, playing into Russia’s hands.
“Secondly, the danger that Russia might believe that the large scale conventional forces which she has shown she can generate at very short notice as we saw in the snap exercise that preceded the tak-over of Crimea could in future be used not only for intimidation and coercion but potentially to seize Nato territory,” General Bradshaw said.
“After which the threat of escalation might be used to prevent re-establishment of territorial integrity. This use of so-called escalation dominance was of course a classic Soviet technique.”
Russian conducted large-scale military “exercises” close to the border it shares with Ukraine before the unrest broke out between pro-Russian separatists - which Nato believe included in their ranks actual Russian soldiers in unmarked uniforms – and the Kiev government.
This resulted in the takeover of Crimea and the eruption of conflict across eastern Ukraine. Ending the violence, will likely see pro-Russian forces keep the territory that they have gained, creating a so-called “frozen conflict” that is in Moscow’s favour.
General Bradshaw’s remarks referred to the same kind of tactics being used, for example against one of the Baltic states. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, like Ukraine, have Russian-speaking minorities. Unlike Ukraine, however, they are also members of Nato. This means that an attack on one of these countries should trigger a military response from the whole alliance.
This is a well-understood concept for conventional warfare involving tanks and bullets and clearly identifiable soldiers. It becomes less certain when ambiguous techniques are deployed, the water is muddied, and Nato leaders are not sure who is the enemy.
 
Living through the eighties never felt as dangerous as this. Mutually Assured Destruction was easier to live with, even as a kid, than this hybrid war militarism from an irredentist Russia. How does the world get out of this one?
 

luka

Well-known member
I noticed this is the drum pilgers been beating recently. I'm sure craner has something to say. He was in a bellicose mood last night. Repeatedly shouting I HAD PUTINS NUMBER TEN YEARS AGO AND YOU ALL IGNORED ME. YOU FOOLS, LOOK AT WHAT HAS COME TO PASS
 
I noticed this is the drum pilgers been beating recently. I'm sure craner has something to say. He was in a bellicose mood last night. Repeatedly shouting I HAD PUTINS NUMBER TEN YEARS AGO AND YOU ALL IGNORED ME. YOU FOOLS, LOOK AT WHAT HAS COME TO PASS

I had Putin's number 17-or-so years ago when he orchestrated the destruction of Grozny.

It may be kicking off in Lithuania already

http://www.defence24.com/analysis_m...he-polish-minority-going-to-be-the-flashpoint
 

luka

Well-known member
oliver craner speaking

I know who is at fault in this war. Just go back to Georgia in 2008, or Ukraine 2004, or Georgia 2003. Or Uzbekistan 2005, Azerbaijan 2004, Belarus since 1999. Been onto Putin for years.
Go read my Belarus and Azerbaijan pieces from 2004, or the Passion of Yulia Tymoshenko essay from 2011, and the Karimova essays from the same year. It's all there.
 

luka

Well-known member
Craner will bridle at that piece of onemanupmamship HMg. He likes to think he stands alone
 
He won't like me quoting him but if he won't blow his own trumpet...

that's all obvious, obviously, and not in dispute. My question is how many dead people a year from now? We've had maybe 10,000 since the snipers took out demonstrators in Kiev on 18/2/2014. I reckon maybe 100,000 to 1 million by this time next year and the rest of us by 2020, at this rate.
 
that's all obvious, obviously, and not in dispute. My question is how many dead people a year from now? We've had maybe 10,000 since the snipers took out demonstrators in Kiev on 18/2/2014. I reckon maybe 100,000 to 1 million by this time next year and the rest of us by 2020, at this rate.

It may be quick, but more likely starvation and exposure for us here in the British Isles, assuming they lay off the biological and chemical weapons. But on the upside (ever the optimist) the housing market may rationalise.

Our stunted descendants will likely talk darkly of "the day the Internet went off". It's wrong to say ours is the worst of all possible worlds, but it's definitely in the lower quartile.
 
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luka

Well-known member
Let me know the optimum time 4 me to use my nz citizenship and escape to the south Pacific pls
 
Or should we work out a assassinate Putin plan?

There were 5 attempts over the past decade or so during various overseas visits, including one in London that was foiled by the Met. It's an open and unsettling question we're all having to get to grips with: what does he want? where will he stop? Emperor of the World or just champion of Russia?
 
Are wars the product of the rational or the irrational?

Who cares? This isn't a philosophical issue, you're pissing in the wind, wasting your time even bothering to burn valuable brain glucose (or whatever sulphorous ichor your mind sucks nutrients from) pontificating on bollocks like that. Protect and survive, yo. Shit's getting real.
 

Leo

Well-known member
ISIS has done such an effective job at social media that people here in the States seem much more preoccupied and fearful of them than of the Russian situation, which seems disproportional to the actual danger posed by each.
 

trza

Well-known member
Abdul Muhid, 32, continued along these lines. He was dressed in mujahideen chic when I met him at a local restaurant: scruffy beard, Afghan cap, and a wallet outside of his clothes, attached with what looked like a shoulder holster. When we sat down, he was eager to discuss welfare. The Islamic State may have medieval-style punishments for moral crimes (lashes for boozing or fornication, stoning for adultery), but its social-welfare program is, at least in some aspects, progressive to a degree that would please an MSNBC pundit. Health care, he said, is free. (“Isn’t it free in Britain, too?,” I asked. “Not really,” he said. “Some procedures aren’t covered, such as vision.”) This provision of social welfare was not, he said, a policy choice of the Islamic State, but a policy obligation inherent in God’s law.

They live among us. Last fall, I visited the Philadelphia mosque of Breton Pocius, 28, a Salafi imam who goes by the name Abdullah. His mosque is on the border between the crime-ridden Northern Liberties neighborhood and a gentrifying area that one might call Dar al-Hipster; his beard allows him to pass in the latter zone almost unnoticed.


http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2015/02/what-isis-really-wants/384980/
 

vimothy

yurp
All the cool kids are discussing that Atlantic piece. Still, I thought this was a bit rich: "Putin could use ambiguous warfare and classic Soviet-style brinkmanship to seize Nato territory and change Europe’s borders".
 
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