Yes, its a gas station with some snacks and really miserable staff.

Definitely not enough that we cant get it from elsewere but enough that itll cripple their own economy instead.

lol the delusions

Disconnecting Russia from SWIFT process has begun, stick to it and get good.
I think the germans are the ones with the biggest issue about gas and only gas.
This is their entire fault btw they will have to deal with it, hopefully they have some stock and the whole summer to change their infrastructure if needed.

faux news / russian propaganda victims buying into the "this will hurt the west just as much as russia" remind me of the braindead brexiteers unable to do simple maths.

yes it will hurt the west. germany, for example, will be one of the harshest hit countries (high energy dependency on russia, export oriented economy, comparatively strong economic ties and geographic proximity...) - but only a complete idiot would not be able to identify that russia is much more dependent on its exports and economic ties with the west than the other way around.

the informed hack might now point to the fact that russia introduced an alternative to SWIFT years ago, that they still have viable export destinations (mainly china), and that a de facto dictatorship with a long history of violently suppressing domestic dissent will be more resilient to public war weariness than a free democracy.
all that might be true to a certain degree (even though it's not as easy as just diverting fuels from western / central fields to china rather than europe when the infrastructure isn't even in place to do that, just to debunk one of the commonly heard talking-points), but it won't make up for the massive imbalance western sanctions will create.

no, russia will be hit disproportionally hard by those sanctions - and it requires some serious mental gymnastics to not realise that.

The more I see what's about to happen in Ukrainian cities, the more I say we bite the bullet and cut them off completely on everything. It will screw us big time but it would decimate the Russian economy to a point where they wouldn't be able to wage war for long

Has there ever been a cause of misguided jingoism that you didn't support? Did you cheerlead the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen? Gotta support the troops, anyone who criticizes American foreign policy is a traitor, rename them freedom fries and liberty cabbage and ban the spice girls, amirite?

American foreign policy should be self-interested. Being pro-American means being against dumb decisions that don't serve our interests. How does help America in the short or long term to take such a bastardized half-measure as sending lethal arms to Ukraine that won't save the country without actual military intervention, which we refuse to take? When, historically, has flooding a conflict zone with American weaponry actually worked out to our advantage? What happens to those guns and missiles in 20 years? We are not willing to defend Ukraine, Biden said so in advance and declared NATO would not check Russia's aggressive expansion into Ukraine. Biden directly stated he would allow Putin to invade his neighbor and overthrow the """""democratically elected government""""" (aka installed via CIA-backed coup that overthrew the actually democratically elected).
So here we are throwing meaningless sanctions at a sanction-proof economy. We're expending every diplomatic escalation that has no actual impact, only posturing. Then we're going to send weapons which cannot actually stop an invasion, only make it more destructive and costly. Which means far more dead Ukrainians and some dead Russians, which means aggravating our relationship with Russia worse than the most dangerous era of the cold war. Its clearly, obviously, not in the interests of the Ukrainian people. They lived under Russian influence for the vast majority of their existence, only an 8 year stretch saw them aligned with the EU, and now you want them to fight to the bitter end- to the point of openly calling for child soldiers armed with little more than molotov cocktails. Going back to Russian masters for them is like "Tuesday". And for our own interests, it doesn't change our sphere of influence, it doesn't recapture Ukraine from Russia, its going to absolutely wreck EU energy markets and make us pay more at the pump, its going to destabilize global security and bring us closer to war.

The real patriots are the people who call out when their country is making a mistake, not cheer for it to go down the wrong path

Are you delusional? Rerouting gas pipelines will take years and years and replacing the network by "something else" in a single summer is even more impossible and just shows how out of touch with reality you really are.





But we get it, as long as war can be waged against countries that you don't agree with and draconian sanctions put in place, you're happy.

You're delusional though, natural gas and oil is going to be a major headache for you guys not even talking about wheat / corn / wood / etc

This post was edited by Djunior on Feb 26 2022 01:31pm

What's happening there is kind of a win if you look at it from the eyes of hawks/NATO.

1. It validates the Russia threat, which means NATO is back in business. We will finally see a trillion dollar defense budget next year in the US, I have no doubt. You're about to see Trumps wish for the Euros to spend more come to fruition over night. This is about to become the golden age for nsa/cia/dod funding. Money flowing like it's the 1960s.

2. It comes at a fairly minimal cost to NATO. No NATO troops on the ground, we can just funnel weapons. In reality NATO doesn't give two fucks about Ukraine from a humanitarian perspective but rather making this as painful as possible for Russia. If the west wanted this war to end like right now, they would tell Zelensky to go talk to Russia and have some sort of pact of neutrality, and we could make this happen diplomatically. Instead many in the west cheer on like fucking idiots that he will arm everyone with an AK in Ukraine. If only people understood what this meant. If Russia starts losing too many ground forces, the actual real war will start with ballistic missiles and indiscriminate bombing and instead of just having a pro-russian gov't with only some military casualties at the end of this you'll have hundreds of thousands dead similarly to what happened in places like Aleppo.

3. It's impossible to know how this pain in Russia will manifest but hard to see a good outcome for them. People in Russia are already protesting this war. Months from now if this is still happening and the average Russian starts feeling the hurt who knows the type of internal strife that could happen.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Feb 26 2022 02:00pm