Not being killed and destroyed entirely.

I think EU and NATO are red lines for Russia. Russias feels threatened by either getting closer to its borders. See the previous war in Georgia 2008 to curb any NATO ambitions.

From what it seems both sides are quite exhausted, although Ukraine is more strained militarily.

Russia will probably come with strong demands though, if they come. I would expect significant territorial gains, maybe masked as “autonomous republics”, a quick rollback of international sanctions and guarantees that Ukraine does not join EU our NATO.

It should be noted that Reichelt of Nius is the former editor in chief of the Bild tabloid, by Axel Springer. Reichelt was let go after the NYT and other Americam media published a story about Reichelt sexually harassing and having affairs with employees.

German publications about that scandal initially were shot down through the influence of Axel-Springer and they only let Reichelt go reluctantly, when the pressure got too high. Now Nius serves as a chain link between the activist Fascist far right and the far right and broader right.

This is why this campaign has been so succesfull. There have been many links established to help normalize the Fascist agenda and the supposed center is willfully receptive of it.

Which age are they?

Because a lot of people love war and nationalist bullshit, when it is other people doing the fighting for them

The UK is digging its own grave here.

First of all persecuting peaceful protestors as “terrorist supporters” for supporting a group that is designated as “terrorist” for non violent civil disobedience is dystopian authoritarian nightmare fuel.

Furthermore this will waste a lot of resources in the counter-terrorism units, judiciary and prison system.

Then this will motivate for escalations. As peaceful protest is crushed and persecuted as “terrorism”, there is no legal reason not to commit acts of actual violence. If people are branded “terrorists” and imprisoned for many years either way, they might as well “make it worthwhile”.

Finally this whole bullshit is weakening the perception of actual terrorism and support for terrorist organizations as a problem. If everyone is a terrorist for not licking the boots of the government, no one is a terrorist.

I can’t claim him to be from my country, but i think everyone should know about Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage for Jewish children in Poland and refused to be save so as to not abandon his children. He was murdered in the Treblinka extermination camp in August 1942 together with the children, who he stood by until their last journey.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janusz_Korczak#The_Holocaust_and_death

Korczak’s diary survived the war; the last entry in it is from August 4.[44] On 5 or 6 (sources vary[44]) August 1942, German soldiers came to collect the 192 orphans (there is some debate about the actual number: it may have been 196) and about one dozen staff members to transport them to the Treblinka extermination camp. Korczak had been offered sanctuary on the “Aryan side” by the Polish underground organization Żegota, but turned it down repeatedly, saying that he could not abandon his children.[45] On 5 August, he again refused offers of sanctuary, insisting that he would go with the children,[45] asserting his belief: “You do not leave a sick child in the night, and you do not leave children at a time like this”.

I recommend everyone to read more of his story.

This is the same argument like “if we dont sell them weapons, someone else will.”

If Russia had the capabilities to do so, they wouldnt rely on Western companies to do it for them. But even if they did, not making ourselves dirty with complicity should be a good enough goal in itself.

Unfortunately it seems that we are morally this bankrupt that instead of saying “nope” we rather say “this will cost extra, but sure lets do it”

In this case it is not about just permitting it to pass, but about Western companies to be involved in keeping the logistics of it up.

I understand this to be about making money with helping Russia sell that oil, not just permitting Russia to sell it elsewhere.

The sanctions lower for the first time the price cap on Russian oil exports. The cap permits the provision of Western transport, trade and insurance services for Russian exports only if the purchase price is below the cap. The new cap will be $47.60 per barrel, down from $60 and will be revised every three months to stay 15% below the market price for Russian exports. Russian crude oil was selling at $59.42 per barrel on Thursday according to Argus, a price-reporting agency.

So in other words, the EU doesn’t want to end Russia’s money stream, if they can strike a good deal out of it…

The bloc will sanction 105 more vessels considered to be part of Russia’s shadow oil fleet and some of the people and companies which operate them, and ban petroleum products based on Russian crude exports. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas said those sanctions will hit Russian oil giant Rosneft’s biggest refinery in India.

Good

I used to run SUSE on a laptop i only used once every three years or so. Because of the “full open source” principle i couldn’t run a lot of online Videos because the codecs were free but proprietary. When i decided to get a new computer as my tower was getting 15, i wanted to switch to a Linux distro as my daily system. Bought a laptop without windows preinstalled and decided to roll with Manjaro as it has KDE and was recommended as suitable for gaming.

Works fine for the most part. The last wave of updates caused some fuss with the desktop, but i can just do everything important from the terminal, while waiting for the next release.

Yeah, that is not true. In most countries in Europe making 4k net puts you in the top 2-10% of income.

The fact that saying $4k net per month on the side is “not good” and “does it to survive” is showing what a failed and depraved country the US is.

There is 60 countries in the world, where the annual GDP per capita is lower than that, and only 20 countries in the world, where the GDP per capita is higher, if we multiply the $4k by 12.

If we assume this to be taxed, then only the tax havens are above that and that is certainly not going to reach most of the people living in these tax havens.

Yeah, my first notion of politics was the song from the Gerhard show.

I agree that the spending is needed. If we tie it to “defense” though, what will happen if there is no threat to defend against?

In a way we saw this already in Germany in the 90s where a lot of disaster relief structures like alarm sirens, emergency communications, technical equipment for excavations, mobile generators and the like has been left to rot, because the cold war had ended (or it seemed so at the time). When we got his by natural disasters like floods and forest fires, the resources weren’t there to quickly manage the situations.

I understand the opportunist approach to taking the funding while we get it, but it doesn’t solve the underlying problem of neoliberalism. Instead it will come back double with the next wave of austerity being argued even harsher because of all that defense spending (whether direct or in “defense infrastructure”) and debt.

These numbers are not reflecting the federal budget. The article is referring to Russias federal budget. Your numbers include all public spending, mostly retirement and healthcare which aren’t financed through the federal budgets. For Germany for instance it is run on mandatory pension and health insurance, cross financed in part from the federal budget.

Money is increasingly needed by the federal treasury, which spends every third ruble on the war

Going off the linked explainer in wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_expenditure

Public expenditures represented 46.7 percent of total GDP of the European Union in 2018. Countries with the highest percentage of public expenditure were France and Finland with 56 and 53 percent, respectively. The lowest percentage had Ireland with only 25 percent of its GDP. Among the countries of the European Union, the most important function in public expenditure is social protection. Almost 20 percent of GDP of European Union went to social protection in 2018. The highest ratio had Finland and France, both around 24 percent of their GDPs. The country with least social protection expenditure as percent of its GDP was Ireland with 9 percent. The second largest function in public expenditure is expenditure on health. The general government expenditure on health in European Union was over 7 percent of GDP in 2018. The country with highest share of health expenditure in 2018 Denmark with 8.4 percent. The least percentage had Cyprus with 2.7 percent. General public services had 6 percent of total GDP of European Union in 2018, Education around 4.6 percent and all other categories had less than 4.5 percent of the GDP.

Germanys federal budget is 476 billion euro in 2024 Germanys 2024 GDP is at 4.3 trillion Euro.

5% of 4.3 trillion is 215 billion. 215 billion is 45% of 476 billion, so even if the budget is increased significantly, these 5% GDP would correspond to a third or even more of the federal budget and be similar to Russias war economy spending.

It all depends on how it all will get managed,

Which is why i am bothered by these quotas. They create an environment for mismanagement. Maybe i am also more sensitive to it in general, because we see a lot of it in Germany, in particular with the military equipment procurement being riddled with corruption, inefficiencies and incompetence. I am worried the same will expand to general infrastructure as well.

So it is a capability that needs to be built. But building that capability should not be dependent on Trumps ramblings.

Problem is say for instance some small bridge in some village needs to be renewed. It is scheduled to cost 5 Million and be suitable for up to 7t trucks passing it. Now because some quota needs to be filled, instead a bridge for 70 ton tanks is built and cost 30 million.

The 5 Million bridge could have been built by a local company. The 30 million bridge needs one of few national specialists to build it. So now it gets delayed further as these companies have more contracts in the pipeline while smaller companies starve.

These types of quotas that are not based on actual needs create bad economic incentives and they create an environment which helps to foster corruption.

Imo. this “defence infrastructure…” category is nonsense.

It can encompass anything and everything, or there could be pressure that only LNG Terminals for US gas and concrete bunkers are considered “resilience”. Also it ties general infrastructure spending to questions of defense and “preparedness” where it might not be applicable.

Rather than saying “we need to spend X% on defense” the question should be: “which capabilities do we need?” and derive the costs from there.

In some EU countries that is the correspondent 5% GDP NATO spending goal.

E.g. if Germany would spend 5% of GDP on military, that would be about half of the current federal budget, so it would become a third of the federal budget if other spending isn’t slashed.

We “ever” had is a bit far fetched imo. Certainly more than what happened during most of Merkels reign, but then again Merkel never failed to pass a budget.