Ukraine conflict

Quote: Gandler

You are hyper focusing on a specific product. Net food, they are dependent. I even cited a pro-Russian paper to show this (and some of their ideas for the Crimea Sanctions). They need food and medication from other countries. Food there is some options (as the paper discusses). Medication, there are very limited options outside of the EU and US.

Russia's economy is based around energy (mostly oil and gas), so EU working to cut off imports of Russian oil and gas is probably the most important thing. Because without their energy they have nothing.

The US needs to focus on nuclear power and franking, for quick results. We are close, but doing a few things wrong. We have the ability to become easily energy independent if the will is there.

Quote: kenarman

The US was net exporters of energy under the last president.

Quote: Pacomartin

Did we make a mistake by enlarging NATO as much as we did?

Quote: odiousgambit

perhaps any former part of the USSR should have been excluded, since a civil war could get started and we then would get involved in that. Plus war could break out over revanchism as is happening in Ukraine. The Baltic states should have been excluded? I don't have a firm position on this.

Here is a question... since the longer war that has gone on in parts of Ukraine have a large, sometimes majority percent of Russian-ethnic population, could that long-standing war that has gone on in Ukraine prior to the current conflict be viewed as civil war in those areas?

Quote: odiousgambit

Here is a question... since the longer war that has gone on in parts of Ukraine have a large, sometimes majority percent of Russian-ethnic population, could that long-standing war that has gone on in Ukraine prior to the current conflict be viewed as civil war in those areas?

Quote:

Former President Donald Trump told a conference on Thursday that he once told a NATO country leader that the U.S. would not protect NATO members from a Russian attack if they did not pay more into the alliance.

Trump made the headline-grabbing remarks while giving the keynote address at the Heritage Foundation’s leadership conference on Amelia Island, Florida. The remarks quickly reverberated throughout the news media as pundits and observers noted the remarks were Trump’s “most explicit statement to date” about breaking NATO treaty commitments.

“Everyone was delinquent, they didn’t pay,” Trump told the crowd at the Ritz Carlton. “And they asked me, one of the presidents of the countries at a closed meeting…he said, ‘Does that mean that you won’t protect us in case – if we don’t pay, you won’t protect us from Russia — was the Soviet Union but now Russia?’”

“I said, ‘That’s exactly what it means,'” Trump continued, claiming he would violate the treaty’s key mutual protection clause. “Now, if I said, ‘No, I don’t mean that,’ then why would they pay? So somebody had to say it. I was amazed it didn’t get out. I was amazed. The fake news didn’t pull it out.”

“The money started to flow in,” Trump added, noting his threat to break the treaty’s Article 5 provision was very “risky.”