I’m hoping the Russian people will give Putin his walking papers.
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It’s plutonium tea o’clock.
About that SWIFT sanction. Paper tiger, it may appear to be.
While SWIFT sanctions mean companies can’t use the messaging system to do business with the Russian entities affected, they can still do business with them, Dimon said. In fact it’s as simple as sending an email with payment instructions, because what SWIFT really is, is a messaging remnant from a bygone era, before emails, even before the fax machine.
Dimon also said that disconnecting Russian banks from the SWIFT messaging system may bring “unintended consequences” that include third parties finding ways around the penalty.
No. It’s a payment confirmation system that makes everything faster. There could be workarounds but doing it manually is not practical, not functional.
Still there are ways around this ban, but it definitely complicates things for them.
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And remember, Russia never thought that SWIFT would be taken away from them. 
Yeah, psychopaths aren’t necessarily stupid. That’s why we’re wondering what we’re missing.
What makes you think we are missing anything?
That’s a shit headline for the comments actually made, in response to specific questions asked.
In the UK at least, this was a mainstay among less-educated Brexiters, “we must protect or boarders!”
Not sure if there was equal spelling challenges in the more Trumpian parts of US?
I see that occasionally, but I don’t necessarily attribute it to educational level. I just tend to sort of visualize things like that, so they make me laugh (usually inwardly).
I remember around junior high school, I took some kind of multiple-choice standardized test, which I guess was for the purpose of assessing our verbal knowledge/abilities. One of the test items involved a sentence that went something like, “He was in high spirits,” and one of the choices for the meaning was, “Some ghosts ran up the stairs.” I thought that sentence was so hilarious that I accidentally chose it for my answer.
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Why he’s done this move despite all the problems that would come after. It seems to be at least a bad idea, potentially a very bad one.
Ukr and the West should make more effort towards welcoming deserting Russian soldiers. Could prove the cheapest and safest way of de-escalating the conflict.
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I think that has occurred to them.
I have had time over lunch to read you full post, while I appreciate your candour and can understand your opposition to getting involved in yet another overseas war or other peoples war.
I also fully understand your point about people not fully understanding the real cost of another TV war. To me this still goes back to the commitments that where made to the Ukrainian, and to keeping to them. If they decide just to brake them because its not convenient, I feel this sets a bad precedent to how they will deal with other defence agreements.
I do know that any nato country that moves troops in to the Ukrainian even as peace keepers risks a sudden escalation, and this should defiantly be the last resort. That being said it should always be there as an option.
You say in another of your post, I hope the people of Russia rise up and stop this nonsense and that the sanctions work. I have see the reports of people demonstrating and reports of Russian military units refusing to fight, I don’t know how true this is but I hope it spreads.
As much as I like the idea of a coup d’état, I think with Putins background he has spent too long seeding the military and the government to prevent this, but I do hope to be proved wrong.
Just a note to you Grammar people, this is a response to @Charlie_Jack he spent the time to lay out his position, so I have made a little time to reply to him. I haven’t had time to go through and clean it all up.
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Because it seems according to experts like CIA Director William Burns who was the former ambassador to Russia and Jordan
‘Hostility to early NATO expansion,” it declares, “is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” On the question of extending NATO membership to Ukraine, Burns’ warnings about the breadth of Russian opposition are even more emphatic. “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin),”
Fiona Hill who recently testified at Trump impeachment wrote.
“Putin would view steps to bring Ukraine and Georgia closer to NATO as a provocative move that would likely provoke pre-emptive Russian military action.”
Full article here.
Doesn’t excuse Putins behavior, not in the slightest or dispense with the argument Ukraine should be allowed to do whatever it likes as a sovereign county.
But we shouldn’t be surprised when Putin does exactly what all the experts warned he would do when Ukraine membership for NATO is brought up and discussed as being a matter of time, but a long way off, like at least 10 years or so.
Speaking of the costs (and thus profits) of war, either this war, or any other one:
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