Hug Laura and George. Carry on being the best husband, father person you can be. Not a lot else you can do right now this minute.
What was the old saying? The first war was fought with bows and arrows. Two World Wars were fought with tanks and guns. A modern war will be fought with nuclear weapons. And the one after will be fought with ............ bows and arrows.
Nothing that can be done from the west without triggering a nuclear war and Putin knows it. However there will be a section of the UK and US economy machine rubbing their hands together as we sell more weapons to the Ukrainians. Assisting the post covid recovery plan... Just throwing this out there but wonder what plans are in place to look at staging an assassination of Putin, making it look like it was carried out by supporters of a political opponent in Russia.
There's consequences with an assasination. They would need to take out EVERY close ally of his too, as there will be strict instruction that if he is indeed taken out, someone has to press the button within minutes.
The only thing I would say is that if he had left it a year or so until Nordstream2 was up and running, and attacked in November, he would hold the key to nearly 75% of Europe's gas (depending on which estimate you read).
Not really Johnson and the Tories might have many faults, but Putin is on a fdifferent level altogether
Oddly enough, and I found it hard to believe, it was on the radio that we only take about 3% of Russian gas ... if by "we" you mean the UK.
Wondering about my daughters trip. She was supposed to do 6 months study in Australia from next week - Covid put paid to that. The replacement course was Padova / Italy .......... she has a flight booked for Monday and accommodation sorted. Wondering how the air travel situation will pan out. :-(
I'm sure she'll be able to take the flight. There have been numerous wars around the world during the period of easier and cheaper flights. And Padova is a very significant distance from the conflict zone... at this stage.
Germany especially. They've been paying billions to Russia for new pipelines, closing down their own energy supplies, and now have something like 70% of their energy from Russia. Hate Trump all you want, I've got no opinion on that, but he's the only person I've seen in power from the West ever highlight this. He told NATO directly that Germany, and Europe, paying billions of dollars to Russia and then wanting support from the US to be protected from Russia didn't make any sense - and to stop paying billions to Russia. Why haven't the others ever done the same? I really worry about how this plays out because we can't just cut Russia off. They've become too important.