no no no no they are not 'extremist' hippies, you need something more than walking around ballock naked in sandals. I mean complete off their face hippies, the whole nine yards, free love.
This is a very useful post, so I looked at a language map of Ukraine to understand a little more about it: The Tale of Two Ukraines, the “Missing” Five Million Ukrainians, and Surzhyk - Languages Of The World | Languages Of The World It's a bit sad that I have to do this. After all, there has been much talk on the news about Ukraine, and a lot written about Putin and Russian expansionism and whatnot but nothing really explaining the language and ethnic make-up of Ukraine, so I am completely ignorant about it. When you look at the map, the solution seems quite simple: Just organise a referendum to decide which bits of Ukraine want to be part of Russia (or some Russian client state) and which bits want to be part of Ukraine and get closer to the West. Then most people will be happy. Not everyone, but that's impossible in any case. There isn't any point thousands of people dying and a half a country's infrastructure being trashed to decide something that you can organise with a simple vote. So you end up with a smaller Ukraine, so what? Better a smaller, cohesive country than a big unhappy one. It worked for Czechoslovakia. Look at the Italian-speaking Swiss canton of Ticino. It is south of the Alps and so really a part of Italy, but it was given the option of voting for whether it wanted to be part of Italy or Switzerland and it chose the latter. No war. War is actually a really pants way of deciding anything, since coercion isn't the best way of getting people to do anything.
Glidd, you (and the rest of Switzerland) are not from Earth, are you? Here in the World, people don't decide things ... it's leaders that decide things. What leaders want and what people want are generally two different things. The Ukrainian leaders aren't going to give up chunks of real estate without it being pulled from their cold dead fingers. The worst thing that can happen to a leader is loss-of-face. Leaders are not wired to cope with such a thing. Dividing up the Ukraine and ceding any of it to a foreign nation represents a loss of prestige. It doesn't matter that it's what people want and that it's fair and equitable, or even if it's inevitable - the Ukraine leadership (like any other leadership) would rather it all burn to the ground.
Then Russia would win the whole of the Ukraine and re annex the lot as votes would be shipped in the same as guns and weapons are being shipped in to kill people now. Putin is a tyrant and it's time people woke up to this, he will be into other former territories next. Most of the issues in Eastern Europe were caused by the UK, America and Russia dividing up these countries after WW2 at though they were ours to play games with, that's the worst tragedy of all, they have suffered year for this unbelievably bad judgement of 'ours' - what were we thinking, liberators of Europe my arse :Wideyed: and then we turn a blind eye to yet another tyrant. Ban all religions and dictators - nuke to lot of the inhuman arseholes unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch: vote @chisel for World Emperor
Agree with this except regarding Vietnam. There was the Viet Cong, comprising irregulars / insurgents and the North Vietnamese Army who were very much a regular army. But the point you make about the asymmetric nature of modern warfare is a good one. Hearts and minds have been used successfully in the past in areas such as Malaysia but in the Middle East there is such a gulf, plus religion, between the two sides that hearts and minds is almost impossible.
Ban all religions and dictators - nuke to lot of the inhuman arseholes unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch:unch: vote @chisel for World Emperor[/QUOTE] they wont even let me be a moderator....
In my thinking, the different regions of the Ukraine - whatever they have as equivalents of counties, or cantons or départements - would vote and those entities would morph into Russia or stay with the Ukraine, or become a separate state. So Russia wouldn't get all of Ukraine. There would have to be an agreement with Russia and the separatists to allow the free elections. You could have UN observers, that sort of thing. Better still, the UN could organise it. Putin may be a tyrant, but that doesn't help us much. He is in power, and he is the guy we have to deal with. At the end of WW2, the Russians occupied Eastern Europe. There wasn't much that the UK and US could do to stop the Iron Curtain. The UK was in no position to start a war with Russia, there was no appetite for one and we wouldn't have won it. Only Churchill wanted to nuke them, but then he had slightly extreme views on many things. It's not a question of turning blind eyes to tyrants, it's a question of what power you really have to change things. We have no more power to get rid of Putin now than we did Stalin then. And it's not our job to mould Eastern Europe to our liking in any case. As soon as Romanians and Bulgarians show up wanting to be part of Europe, no one wants them. Oh the irony!
