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Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

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Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#791
post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the meantime I fear he is indeed that crazy. He repeatedly stated that his goal is to wipe out Ukraine at any costs. He is a like a little child that doesn't get his way and then blindly hits at everything in his reach.

Can you post a link to a video him saying that, I never heard it

One occasion was the latest phone call with Emanuel Macron (French President) Putin stated:

> the Kremlin said that Mr. Putin had told his French counterparty

> that his main goal was “the demilitarization and neutral status of Ukraine.”

> Those goals, the Kremlin said, “will be achieved no matter what.”

The only English source I could find quickly was this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/03/world/europe/putin-macron...

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#792
post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo. Unfortunately NATO made it very clear to everyone over the past eight years that it's not going to spill blood over Ukraine. ... But now that the opportunity to trap Putin in a quagmire has presented itself, it does seem to be ready to flood the region with weapons. Had it done so at any point in the preceding eight years, war might well have been avoided. Which leads me to think that avoiding war was never th…

I think it's a bit of a catch-22: given one of Putin's stated aims is to demilitarise Ukraine and remove Western weapons, NATO arming Ukraine earlier would have caused Russia to invade earlier.

Invasions take a lot of preparation. You can't just tell your army to attack some country - they need to plan exactly how they will do it, and practice.

The turnaround time on this sort of thing does not favor the aggressor.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#793
post #546
post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> It looks like nobody holding their promises right now, i.e. USA, Brittain, RF, France are traitors, thus Ukraine has full right to not obey this agreement either. No, the only traitor is Russia. Look at the actual contents of Budapest memorandum [1]. This is in summary what the parties committed to: 1) Respect Belarusian, Kazakh and Ukrainian independence and sovereignty in the existing borders. 2) Refrain from the…

There actually seems to have been a promise made, back in 1991, that NATO wouldn't expand eastward beyond Germany. Somebody did some research deep and found an assurance like that in protocols, Spiegel reports

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-e...

Or if you want just the quote out of the protocol by the researcher, see here:

https://twitter.com/shifrinson/status/1160540400760832000/ph...

Not sure how binding such an assurance is or should be.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#794

This has been a real reckoning for me, as somebody who has historically been very pro-nuclear. Quite simply, humanity is too good at screwing things up to harness such a fundamentally powerful and dangerous source of power. It requires a commitment to long lasting peace and stability that we're just not capable of.

They just want control of electricity sources, for that you take control of the plant or you strike the transport infrastructure around it, you don't strike the reactors themselves.

The day people start bombing nuclear power plants we'll be deep in ww3 already and we'd be fuck regardless

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If who exactly sets foot in a country that recognizes the convictions? No country is going to try to start a war with Russia by detaining their President.

Once Putin is detained the war will end. At the very least a condemnation/conviction in absence will be another prestige blow, if that's possible. Germany started an independent proceeding btw: Once you violate the sovereignty of other countries and or human rights, you lose your own formal indefeasibility. It's called "Weltrecht".

The war with Ukraine is not just due to Putin. This idea that everyone is just following the orders of one man is absurd. It isn't going to be like a movie where once they take out the leader everyone puts down their weapons. Detaining him would not end the conflict and would be seen as an attack on Russia that could provoke the use of nukes.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#796
post #734
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a mad man who's going to lose anyway, what does he care if he takes the whole world with him?

He will lose in many respects, but even so, Moscow and St. Petersburg are not going to be radioactive craters. All evidence suggests he wants to be remembered as a Russian hero. I think he is intelligent enough to know that bringing nuclear destruction on Russia will not put him in that category. And it's not possible for him to act alone anyway. Worth noting that the two people in human history who have acted to sto…

It is completely mind numbingly crazy how much is at stake based on a single psychopaths whims, and possibly the courage of a few people selected by the same psychopath.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. And one of those (pravda) is a kind of a half-truth used to keep moving from the current situation. Russians know they are and have been lied to, but the culture is to keep going anyways, because that's how things have been done since forever.

>The Russian language has three words for lying, two for truth. I looked into this, and found this blog post [1]. The comments are quite interesting, but the main post points out this isn't much different from English. In English we use synonyms for truth/true (e.g. authentic, factual, legitimate, etc) and lie (e.g. fabrication, falsehood, misrepresentation, disinformation) with different meanings too. Maybe we shoul…

The eskimos have fifty five billion words for snow but only one word for Bitcoin.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#798

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would have needed to happen a long time ago to have the altnerative energy sources in production today. Which also begs another counterfactual scenario: what if we had spent even a slightly larger fraction of the taxpayer r&d subsidies on renewables rather than the extremely capital heavy nuclear research on both military and civilian sectors, with many decades long dead-ends (breeders, gas cooled, liquid cooled…

r&d in nuclear pretty much died down over past couple decades, it all went into wind and solar. and i think it's a mistake. safe compact nuclear reactors have been developed even with reduced capital, imagine where we could've been if we continued developing.

To have more nuclear power now the plant constructions would have needed to take place starting 30ish years ago, to account for the 15 year lead time per unit and to space apart the large number of construction starts to get an appreciable number of them operational. To have better renewables in the counterfactual r&d scenario, the earlier we diverted the resources the better acceleration payoff it would have had, ideally in the 50s to 70s.

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#799
post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything in the Mueller report was true. No republican has denied that, or come to any other conclusion in their committee reports. Trump was cleared in the impeachment not because of the contents of the report, but whether what happened technically constituted collusion, or whether republicans felt that convicting him was necessary for what he and his associates did in fact do. This is what the last report from th…

The Mueller report clearly states they did not find evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded or conspired with Russia to interfere with the election. That nonsense was all a conspiracy theory. For example Adam Schiff never had the "ample evidence" for it, despite being on the house intelligence committee. That was bald faced and repeated lie peddling this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately many fall for these "stol…

I know you're not responding in good faith, but I want to respond with actual quotes from the Mueller report, since this is on a public forum.

> "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him."

> "[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the facts and the applicable legal standards, we are unable to reach that judgment."

> “Our investigation found multiple acts by the President that were capable of exerting undue influence over law enforcement investigations, including the Russian-interference and obstruction investigations,” Mueller wrote. “The incidents were often carried out through one-on-one meetings in which the President sought to use his official power outside of usual channels. These actions ranged from efforts to remove the Special Counsel and to reverse the effect of the Attorney General’s recusal; to the attempted use of official power to limit the scope of the investigation; to direct and indirect contacts with witnesses with the potential to influence their testimony.”

> "the President engaged in a second phase of conduct, involving public attacks on the investigation, non-public efforts to control it, and efforts in both public and private to encourage witnesses not to cooperate with the investigation."

https://www.factcheck.org/2019/04/what-the-mueller-report-sa...

In case it's not obvious, the point of obstructing justice is to prevent facts from coming out.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/obstruction-justice-mueller-repo...

Re: Fire extinguished at Ukraine nuclear power plant, Europe's largest

#800
post #799

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Mueller report clearly states they did not find evidence that Trump or his campaign colluded or conspired with Russia to interfere with the election. That nonsense was all a conspiracy theory. For example Adam Schiff never had the "ample evidence" for it, despite being on the house intelligence committee. That was bald faced and repeated lie peddling this conspiracy theory. Unfortunately many fall for these "stol…

I know you're not responding in good faith, but I want to respond with actual quotes from the Mueller report, since this is on a public forum. > "While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him." > "[I]f we had confidence after a thorough investigation of the facts that the President clearly did not commit obstruction of justice, we would so state. Based on the…

You're the one not responding in good faith because I never said anything one way or the other about obstructing justice. That's clearly a far more complicated and nuanced question seeing as he was head of the executive at the time.

The idea he colluded with Putin to hack the election was always an utter baseless fantasy. There was no evidence for it ever. Not from Mueller, not from Schiff, not from 17 intelligence agencies. It was a conspiracy theory.

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