This feels like the flip side of the White House’s rhetorical game-playing about “invasions” versus “minor incursions.” How “minor” does an incursion need to be to avoid qualifying as an “invasion”?
Similarly, how restrained does the U.S. response to Russian aggression need to be to avoid qualifying as “major? The term is sufficiently vague that it can mean anything.
I hope Trudeauscu commits to 40,000 Ukraine refugees as he did for his Afghan Mohammedans.
Imagine – it’s winter. Heating oil prices are rising. Low temperatures are forecast for the next few days.
You turn on your television and hear the first reports of a massive cyberattack against America’s largest pipeline.
Ransomware has infected the company’s computer system, bringing operations to a halt as IT staff work feverishly to stop the spread.
In the wake of what the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, described as Russia’s “fully fledged invasion of Ukraine”, the west has to decide how to respond to what France’s Emmanuel Macron has called a turning point in European history.
Yet can the west now offer Ukraine more than a mixture of prayers, sanctions and diplomatic demarches? Throughout this conflict western intelligence has shown it has been able to predict Putin’s next step, but less capable of stopping it. Boris Johnson told the Ukrainian people “we are with you”, but what this western solidarity means in practice is now up for debate.
Russian forces have seized control of Chernobyl nuclear power plant after a ‘fierce’ battle, with the condition of nuclear storage facilities ‘unknown’, sparking fears of a radiation leak that could cause fallout in Europe.
Video revealed Russian tanks and armoured vehicles standing in front of the destroyed reactor, which sits just 60 miles north of the capital Kiev.
Meanwhile Turkey reported that one of its ships had been hit by a ‘bomb’ off the coast of Odessa, where fighting is also going on. Turkey is a member of NATO, underlining fears that the war in Ukraine could quickly suck in other states and spark an all-out conflict in Europe.
