What is truthdig.com? They make a major revelation out of something that is obvious to anybody who spent just 5 minutes thinking about it. Ever since the Roman panem et circenses it is known that even the most authoritarian of dictators has to maintain some level of approval by the people he rules and can't do everything he wishes.
Hitler had his KdF and still had to scale down his eradication of "undesirables" before the start of the war, putin has been bribing russians for more than 20 years with scraps from oil money and yet he can't use conscripts in Ukraine.
It shouldn't be therefore surprising that economic sanctions are enacted also against the population in hope that they will undermine the support for the government in question.
In ideal world EU should agree on a handful of red state exports on which we'd apply say 10%, let the US exporters explain their president why that's wrong and only then enter the negotiations with the US and whatever then the outcome is GET IT IN THE WRITING with his signature.
Yes, he would then try to blame the "evil EU", but having a written and signed agreement is the only way to prevent this monthly "it's on - and now it's off" charade.
Now unfortunately even if anybody had the balls to actually propose it there is too many actors who would shoot any such proposal down. Be it because of fear for their exports or just to be contrarian.
Austria isn't as blatant as Hungary but their policy is also pretty russia-friendly.
And there is a reason A-H collapsed and it wasn't just because of WW1 and Bosnian Serbs. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians or basically anybody who wasn't German or Hungarian hated the monarchy in the end(With the possible exception of the Croats, who reached some kind of agreement with Hungarians right before the collapse).
As long as they control the government, military, police and other stuff putin and his regime are russia. If russians don't like that they can make their own Maidan.
I think the unwillingness to switch Ukraine to 155mm caliber prior to 2022 has less to do with the west trying to not provoke russia and more with Ukraine's desire to use existing stocks and tooling in domestic ammo factories. They themselves ordered DANA M2 in 152mm caliber in 2020. Only after the invasion they realized they will need much more ammo then they can produce domestically and west started providing 155mm systems. Already in 2022 Ukraine has been given German PzH 2000, Slovak Zuzana 2, French Caesar and eventually Swedish Archer. The ammo problem simply took time to solve, but it seems European productions is ramping up and the Czech initiative is still ongoing.
The need for armoured cabin is now well understood and I would say that Swedish and Czech solutions go even further with autoloaders and targeting computers reducing the crew needed to as little as 2 and removing the need for the crew to leave the cabin during a fire mission.
Interesting, the article somehow presents this as something new and groundbreaking, but wheeled self-propelled howitzer was introduced by Czechoslovakia and South Africa already in the 80's. And indeed Czech and Slovak howitzers derived from the original DANA are used by AFU since at least 2022.
When Rosa Luxembourg was murdered fascism wasn't an international threat but a local Italian movement at best. Or is everything you don't like fascism to you?
You may know IPv6 is ridiculously bigger, but you don’t know it.
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
No matter whether we are talking about real space or IPv6 address space, Douglas Adams' quotes always come handy.
What is truthdig.com? They make a major revelation out of something that is obvious to anybody who spent just 5 minutes thinking about it. Ever since the Roman panem et circenses it is known that even the most authoritarian of dictators has to maintain some level of approval by the people he rules and can't do everything he wishes.
Hitler had his KdF and still had to scale down his eradication of "undesirables" before the start of the war, putin has been bribing russians for more than 20 years with scraps from oil money and yet he can't use conscripts in Ukraine.
It shouldn't be therefore surprising that economic sanctions are enacted also against the population in hope that they will undermine the support for the government in question.