OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

We're not talking about a few votes here and there, we are talking about an unheard-of swing towards a virtually-unknown pro-Putin extremist candidate in a country which has every reason to hate Putin. This isn't subtle influence, it is blatant interference and that is what the Constitutional Court concluded after weighing up the evidence.

I'm sure they will object to being called that, but they may as well know that's what some of them look like from a lot of countries at the moment.

"If you save someone's life, they will hate you forever."

A Chinese proverb, I think.

The big question about Russian missiles and nukes is, will they work?

As in the classic Russian fairytale Cinderella: If shoe fits, wear it

The Russians know that their stuff isn't especially reliable, then and now. So they have always used lots of warheads, so at least one will work.

Sounds like the American philosophy on healthcare

Don't worry so long as Putin pretends to be nice to Trump and we make sure to never stop sending weapons and money to Israel everything will be fine.

Redundancy is your friend. And Russia can certainly afford it.

I love my doctor. She wears miniskirts and calls me John. I call her Sam.

The level of Russian "influence" in Romania was a lot higher than it has been in the UK and the US. Gullible twits like you believe what they are told in Russia Today and that may represent "undue" influence, but it is politically insignificant.

It mostly is laughable - as are your claims here.

Trump did have chance to argue that the election that threw him out wasn't free and fair - he launched some sixty court cases that did exactly that, and all of them were thrown out of court. His arguments didn't hold water.

Trump's incompetent management of the Covid-19 epidemic in the US probably cost about a half a million Americans their lives.

They won't love him forever, but their surviving relatives seem to have voted for him.

And she isn't going to risk wrecking your relationship by saving your life. American health care isn't great - as reflected in the US expectation of life.

The US Abrahams tank relies on a German gun and UK (Chobham) armour.

Europe's armies are perfectly adequate - more cost effective than the baroque arsenal that the US military-industrial complex has got the US to pay for. The US wants it allies to buy it's over-priced weapons, and makes inflated claims about their effectiveness.

Cursitor Doom is a gullible twit, and believes that kind of nonsense.

Europe has invested in its own defense all along - just less extravagantly (and more cost-effectively than the US).

The way the Russian armored column that tried to take Kyiv at the start of the Russian invasion of the Ukraine got chewed up and stopped by cheap Ukranian drones is a fact that American commentators seem to ignore. <snip>

Actually, they can't. They are importing artillery shells and infantry from North Korea. They can't sell as much oil as they used to, and the sanctions work well enough that they have to sell it more cheaply.

Russia is large, but it isn't well-run.

Four of them came down in Romania last week - we haven't heard much about that on the UK news. Two were in Moldavia, close to the border, so they might have been a mistake, but two more were well inside Romania.

But the Americans won't have to fight if Trump has his way. He thinks he can just keep Putin happy by feeding him European countries, one-by-one.

NATO exists so that he can't do that. An attack on one NATO member is an attack on all of them. Ukraine is a not a member of NATO (and Putin doesn't want it to join).

A flourish of the pen is all it needs to destroy that. Trunp has pulled out of other alliances when it suits him, why not this one?