Three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out.
Well, since we were not able to get our production up sufficiently in the 3 years(or the 8 before that) we have to pay now. The question is whether our governments have a plan how to replace these shipments with our production. Even if the war in Ukraine ends it might be soon needed in Caucasus, Moldova or elsewhere.
The latest news is they got back through Estonia. Too bad, they should have been left to rot in Mordor. Or made to pay for detour through Turkey at the very least.
What is truthdig.com? They make a major revelation out of something that is obvious to anybody who spent just 5 minutes thinking about it. Ever since the Roman panem et circenses it is known that even the most authoritarian of dictators has to maintain some level of approval by the people he rules and can't do everything he wishes.
Hitler had his KdF and still had to scale down his eradication of "undesirables" before the start of the war, putin has been bribing russians for more than 20 years with scraps from oil money and yet he can't use conscripts in Ukraine.
It shouldn't be therefore surprising that economic sanctions are enacted also against the population in hope that they will undermine the support for the government in question.
In ideal world EU should agree on a handful of red state exports on which we'd apply say 10%, let the US exporters explain their president why that's wrong and only then enter the negotiations with the US and whatever then the outcome is GET IT IN THE WRITING with his signature.
Yes, he would then try to blame the "evil EU", but having a written and signed agreement is the only way to prevent this monthly "it's on - and now it's off" charade.
Now unfortunately even if anybody had the balls to actually propose it there is too many actors who would shoot any such proposal down. Be it because of fear for their exports or just to be contrarian.
Austria isn't as blatant as Hungary but their policy is also pretty russia-friendly.
And there is a reason A-H collapsed and it wasn't just because of WW1 and Bosnian Serbs. Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians or basically anybody who wasn't German or Hungarian hated the monarchy in the end(With the possible exception of the Croats, who reached some kind of agreement with Hungarians right before the collapse).
As long as they control the government, military, police and other stuff putin and his regime are russia. If russians don't like that they can make their own Maidan.
Smokers...