Ukraine / Russia - Actions and Reactions
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Facing Russian Gas Cuts, Europe Dims Lights, Cools Pools and Shortens Showers
BERLIN—Lights illuminating many of the German capital’s monuments are going dark. Officials here and in the Netherlands have urged residents to take shorter showers. The Spanish prime minister suggested ditching ties to cope with the summer heat. New limits on air conditioning in Spain are going into effect there this week.
Across Europe, national and local governments are pushing to curtail energy usage as Russia cuts its gas shipments in response to Western sanctions during the war in Ukraine. The piecemeal restrictions have so far had minor but far-reaching impacts on daily life across the continent, with some public pools lowering temperatures, city centers losing overnight lighting and fountains running dry.
“CBS news reported facts that are inconvenient to the pro-Ukraine consensus here in the swamp – and then scrambled to walk it back. This media episode is egregious, but unsurprising,” he told The Daily Wire. “Anyone who raises critical questions about the lack of oversight on Ukraine funding is tarred as a ‘Putin puppet,’ which is an utterly ridiculous charge.”
The revisions made to the CBS report were explained in an editor’s note at the top of their original report, saying that the estimated percentage of aid reaching the front lines was from April and that since that time, delivery had improved — though no specific numbers were given.
The Ukrainian government told CBS that U.S. defense attaché Brigadier General Garrick M. Harmon arrived this month to supervise transfer of aid. The Ukraine Centre for Strategic Command was critical of the initial report, saying that there was more oversight than the initial report implied.
In April, Jonas Ohman, the president of an organization moving aid into Ukraine, told CBS Reports that only “30-40%” of aid was making it to its intended destination. He also said his group, which does not supply weapons, had to avoid various factions in the country playing “power games” to deliver the aid.
www.dailywire.com
The revisions made to the CBS report were explained in an editor’s note at the top of their original report, saying that the estimated percentage of aid reaching the front lines was from April and that since that time, delivery had improved — though no specific numbers were given.
The Ukrainian government told CBS that U.S. defense attaché Brigadier General Garrick M. Harmon arrived this month to supervise transfer of aid. The Ukraine Centre for Strategic Command was critical of the initial report, saying that there was more oversight than the initial report implied.
In April, Jonas Ohman, the president of an organization moving aid into Ukraine, told CBS Reports that only “30-40%” of aid was making it to its intended destination. He also said his group, which does not supply weapons, had to avoid various factions in the country playing “power games” to deliver the aid.
Republican Lawmakers Demand More Accountability Over Ukrainian Aid After CBS Report
Republican lawmakers are demanding more accountability over the billions of dollars of aid sent to Ukraine following a report stating that some of the aid was not making it to its intended destination. A report from CBS last week detailed that, especially early on in the conflict, oversight of...
HemiHauler
Well-Known Member
Oh geeze - you don’t say.
I mean if you listen to the ignorati here, Ukraine is the most corrupt country in the universe and therefore no one should care.
I mean, they make a compelling argument.
SamSpade
Well-Known Member
One of my kids is from Russia - I've been frequenting Russia forums for over a decade. They're my number one go to on the Ukraine thing.
And it takes all my nerve not to say anything, because so many on these places think everything reported from the West is faked, a lie, the Ukrainian people WANT them there, they are freeing an oppressed nation, the United States wants war - it's endless.
And I don't care that the government may be corrupt - a sovereign nation is being levelled to the ground, millions of refugees the likes of which haven't been seen in generations are flooding the rest of Europe, and Russia's "reasons" for attacking sound almost exactly like the reasons the Nazis gave for taking Austria; the Sudetenland (and other areas of Czechoslovakia); Danzig - and that is - "these are areas populated by Germans and they need to be freed from their oppressive states". Hence, South Ossetia - the Crimea - Abkhazia - and now, the Luhansk and Donestsk regions.
I have little doubt they WOULD have tried the same stunt in the Baltic states - Latvia and Estonia are about one fourth ethnic Russians - but - they're also NATO.
There's a certain irony in the fact that Russia bellows about not letting Ukraine into NATO - and their answer is to do EXACTLY the thing NATO was created to prevent - a Russian invasion.
Remember the Ukraine War?
There’s little reason for you to remember this, but there was a lot of public pressure at the time against Koch Industries (yes, of the “evil” Koch brothers fame) because they hadn’t cut off all ties with Russia at the start of the virtue signal. Eventually, they did end their relationship with Russia, but that barely got any mention. Ben Stiller’s trip to meet with Zelensky got more in-depth coverage.
Meanwhile, what has been accomplished? Ukraine has more military aid than it realistically knows what to do with and inflation is worse. And in between visits from award winning actors and actresses, Zelensky still demands more.
Let me say that I don’t have a problem with sanctions, as long as they are targeted and have teeth. Sanctions that don’t work are a waste of time and money. But Zelensky’s continued calls for sanctions on everything have become so ubiquitous that they have lost all meaning.
They haven’t just lost all meaning for the public, they’ve lost teeth with governments. After publicly imposing sanctions on people with ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and the government itself, not everyone is playing along.
Airbus, for example, the French airplane manufacturer, continued to do business with Russia. Bloomberg reported the company “defended its decision to keep importing Russian titanium, contending sanctions would hurt aerospace manufacturers who depend on the lightweight metal and wouldn’t deter Vladimir Putin after his invasion of Ukraine.” Meanwhile, Airbus continues to get US government contracts with our military.
We can keep giving them equipment, but without the trained people to use them its wasted. They need soldiers more than anything. No one is sending them.
Black Hole: as billions in American arms and aid enter Ukraine, US officials receive hand written receipts
With tens of billions of dollars aid money allocated to Ukraine, and untold billions in military equipment shipped across the border, when U.S. arms and aid enter Ukraine, it enters into a black hole. Given the notorious corruption in Kiev, perhaps that’s all by design.
Where do all of the weapons and aid end up, exactly? Nobody knows, not even the inspector general who is supposed to be America’s watchdog on this effort.
In a Bloomberg article from the weekend titled, “Torrent of Cash for Ukraine Arms Puts Pentagon Watchdog on Alert,” an amazing bombshell comes via a quote in the story that seems to imply the opposite of the piece’s accountability theme.
A Pentagon official, Inspector General Sean O’Donnell, is quoted as saying that Ukrainian officials do their accounting of American equipment and aid with “hand receipts, it’s all paper.”
U.S. agents search New York properties linked to sanctioned Russian oligarch -NBC
U.S. law enforcement agents on Thursday searched New York properties linked to Viktor Vekselberg, a sanctioned billionaire Russian oligarch, NBC New York reported, as Washington seeks to use sanctions and property seizures to pressure Moscow to stop its invasion of Ukraine.
I bet they are looking for ties to Trump too.
Or cleaning up the ties to "Hunter and the Big Guy."
In a totally predictable story which corporate media is pretending took them completely by surprise, the Financial Times ran an article yesterday headlined, “Russia Switches Off Europe’s Main Gas Pipeline Until Sanctions Are Lifted.”You’ll recall that Russia warned them, twice, both times claiming it couldn’t get spare parts “because of sanctions” and so had to reduce the natural gas flow first to 40%, then to 20%, but Europe was just going around, fat and happy, pretending like it never got the overdue notices.
The elites just can’t understand this move, not at all. First of all, they’ve never even KNOWN anyone who’s had their power cut off before. They think having the power cut off is a MORAL failure. Since elites believe Europeans are morally superior to Russians, this power-cutting-off is an outrage! It’s defamation! It’s disgustingly inequitable. It’s backwards, the opposite of equity. It’s non-equity! And even worse, it’s socially unjust or something. (I can’t follow the lefty logic.)
According to the Times, the Kremlin abruptly announced that Russia’s gas supplies to Europe through the NordStream 1 pipeline won’t — can’t — be fully reconnected until the “collective west” lifts sanctions against Moscow over the invasion of Ukraine. The announcement went something like this, “European comrades do not pay bill, do not make arrangement, and always call Russian people bad names. So have no choice but cut gas, very sorry.”
Corporate media and ignorant politicians in this country think it is patently unfair for Russia to stop selling its gas to Europe, just because of a few sanctions between friendly countries. Here’s a hilarious example from the article of how out-of-touch the elites are:
Hahahahaha! I can’t believe they actually printed that horse hockey. Please. These guys are giving me too much material.
What do these dummies think “sanctions” are? Hey, Europeans! You guys cut the Russians off from a bunch of stuff, like SWIFT, and now the Russians are sanctioning you back. YOU STARTED IT. Say what you want about the Russians, but at least they aren’t going around whining about their sanctions like the Europeans and lefty politicians in America.
Europe, you want to fight with the big boys? Get out of that dress, put some real shoes on, and take your sanctions like a man. Quit crying about them, you big babies.
Germany, which was particularly surprised by the announcement while gayly frolicking at a leatherwear ‘festival’ or something, will be hardest hit. Already suffering from crippling energy inflation, with prices having skyrocketed up to ten times since the beginning of the year, the country’s citizens face truly astronomical energy bills as it heads into a frigid winter.
Elites aren’t affected by energy prices too much, because if their power bill goes from $500 a month to $5,000 a month, they don’t really even notice. For heaven’s sake, their next cut out of the Ukraine cash grab is over a hundred times that much. But the average German can’t afford the rates where they are now, much less where rates are headed.
In other words, a lot of ordinary Germans are going to have THEIR gas cut off for not paying their bills. So far, German elites have elevated principle over practical politics, sacrificing its citizens to boost the West’s suicidal Ukraine policy. How long the Germans will put up with this remains unclear.
They aren’t completely quiescent though. Signs of life are sprouting up. For example, German social media influencer Kim DotCom (1M followers) retweeted this post by Lebanese influencer Sarah Abdallah (300K followers), about French protests to get out of NATO:
You’ve heard about the French protests to get out of NATO, haven’t you? Haha, just kidding. Of COURSE you haven’t. That’s the wrong kind of civil unrest for corporate media. They don’t like reporting THAT kind.
But there’s a lot of that kind of unrest going around.
☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Tuesday, September 6, 2022 ☙ SPECIAL MASTERS 🦠
Double wins for the Trump team, as the former Prez gets a special master and the J6 Committee drops a key subpoena; ivermectin study and consequences; Russia sanctions crybaby Europe; and more.
www.coffeeandcovid.com
