Cizzler

They beat Leeds the game before this. Although agree if they lose to Burnley they’re in trouble

Who does a false flag op benefit? They are already performing atrocities on Ukrainian civilians, they don’t need to conjure up a ‘justification’. And they already feed their own citizens whatever information they want - so it’s not like they need to ‘sell’ Ukrainian aggression. I find it hard to believe they’d deliberately blow up their own fuel supplies when they already control what their citizens believe.

The Ruble rate is not a meaningful reflection of the Russian economy. The WSJ did a good article on this a few days pack. It’s behind a paywall - but you can find the article here if interested: https://jnews.uk/how-russias-central-bank-engineered-the-rubles-rebound/

It depends what you mean by bypass. The "West" is over half of the world's GDP. I'm sure they can function by only trading with the East, but their economy will take years to recover. There's no short-term solution to this. Key countries in Europe are over-reliant on Russian energy. These countries would risk recession if they suddenly stopped buying this energy. However, long-term Russia has lost the EU energy market permanently.

The Ruble exchange rate is not a meaningful reflection of Russia’s economy. It stopped being so the second Russia’s central bank severely limited anyone being able to sell the Ruble. The WSJ did a good article on this a few days pack. It’s behind a paywall - but you can find the article here if interested: https://jnews.uk/how-russias-central-bank-engineered-the-rubles-rebound/

Collateral damage possibly? They were hardly careful with the nerve agent in Salisbury... I think I read four Ukranian diplomats also displayed symptoms of an attack - so it's unlikely Roman was the main target, but who knows.

To be honest, I had completely trivialised alopecia as "just hair loss" before reading this (and bickster's) post. So thank you for posting this.

Why was Dresden any worse than the bombing of London during WW2?

Highly doubt it tbh. Walker and Trippier will be around for the next year or two anyway. Then you have Wan-Bissaka, Lamptey and Livramento started the season well too. James Justin was about to get a call-up before his ACL tear, so was ahead of Cash in Southgate's thoughts. He was nowhere near the England team and never would have been. Scroll back 10 pages and people were saying he was toilet. Amazing what a couple of goals can do to a defender's reputation.

Realistically, he's never going to start ahead of Trent A-A or Reece James. They're both younger and a lot better than him.

To what end? It's illogical to do that. It would only lengthen the damage the Western sanctions are doing to the economy.

The Russian Air Force doesn’t have a cat in hell’s chance vs. the USAF. The only way Russia will ever invade a NATO country is if they are 100% certain the USA won’t respond. It’s a complete mis-match.

Not sure what you watched - but the UN have no power to veto NATO members. There are no Russians in NATO. It's a defensive alliance of the US, Canada + most of Western (and now Eastern...) Europe. It's head is Jens Stoltenberg and he's Norweigan. The prior head was Danish I think. The UN Secretary General is Portguese, Antonio Gutteres. Russia are on the Security Council of the UN (along with the UK, USA, China and France aka the original nuclear powers) - this gives them the right to veto legislation proposed in the UN. However, NATO is a completely independent organisation.

He's not going to go into a NATO country. He's not gone insane, he's not going to invade the USA. They'd get absolutely battered. It's a terrible tragedy and a humanitarian disaster - but ultimately, we can't risk nuclear war on the sovereignty of Ukraine. I think they need to accept Putin's demands. The loss of innocent life is going to become even more depressing otherwise.

But there isn't a bottom-less pit of money. At some point you have to decide if you're willing to spend on Defence at the sacrifice of the NHS, pensions, education, etc. Ultimately, it's fruitless anyway. A war with anyone would be absolutely devastating. All we can do is keep ticking our box by investing 2% of our GDP and pray the USA stays in NATO. We're not beating anyone, let alone Russia, by our own - whether we had 30 more Challenger tanks or not.

This war has been the best thing to happen to him. Completely taken the heat off back home. Him and Rishi were interviewed by the police under caution re: C-19 parties last week - barely heard a peep from the media. He idolises Churchill, I bet he’s loving this.

He's selling his entire London property portfolio. Strange way to go about staying in London...

I expect this was Putin’s goal all along. He can’t have expected to subjugate the entirety of a country that big. Putin will get the huge natural gas reserves in the East of the country and control the access to the Black Sea in the South. He’ll also have the “buffer” between the NATO states. I think he underestimated the West’s co-ordinated response/ sanctions and under-estimated Zelenskyy too. I imagine we’ll get a ceasefire relatively shortly (hopefully), fingers crossed it doesn’t take the Russians shelling the shit out of Kharkiv and Kiev (but I’m worried it might). The Western sanctions will probably end there. European energy strategy and Ukraine’s borders will change, and little else.

David Davis pretty loosely (TA's before he went to uni) - but the rest, yes

I mean, the USA spent months amassing their forces in Kuwait and were facing a much weaker military opposition. It's not incomparable. Ukraine doesn't have a chance here. They can drag it out with guerilla fighting for a while. Modern armies are not well-equipped for urban warfare and it will take the Russians months to clear the big cities if there is strong resistance.

It took the combined USA and U.K. forces well over a month to take Iraq. There's literally no way Putin thought it would be over already. Also the protests were by a few thousand people out of a population of 144 million. I imagine it's going pretty much as he expected.

He’s been utterly utterly dreadful

Looking more and more like the right decision to flog him for £100m… Sadly unlikely to be just alcohol for our Jack, gurning away on that lollipop. I’m slowly moving from hoping he’d fail miserably to hoping he’s okay. Doesn’t look like he’s got the right people around him at the moment.

There is no chance Young is a PL level left back. He played LWB in a 3-5-2 in Serie A a year ago. He’s 36 and barely played LB in his life. If Digne gets injured, this move will look even more moronic than it currently does.

Looks like Forest are going to sign Sam Surridge today. A striker in a similar mould to Keinan - so could limit his minutes going forward.