Weak OSCE observers in Ukraine only in action during banking hours - without binoculars!

The Putin sponsored war against Ukraine goes on uninterrupted, while the OSCE cease-fire observers - nicknamed the "deaf, dumb and blind" by locals - limit their weak presence to banking hours:

AVDIIVKA, Ukraine — As the afternoon shadows grow long, nocturnal creatures begin to stir. A stray cat rises from a nap, stretches and trots off to hunt. Overhead, swallows swoop and screech in the deepening twilight.

Soon, the human inhabitants of this town in eastern Ukraine set about their evening rituals.

Green-clad soldiers strap on their helmets and load their guns, while white-clad European cease-fire observers pocket their notebooks, climb into their cars and drive away. And then the fighting starts.

This improbable routine between soldiers and monitors with the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe plays out nightly, illustrating the glum quagmire of the Ukraine war, now entering its third year.

“I never see them here at night,” said Tatyana Petrova, whose apartment looks over a parking lot that is a frequent listening post for the monitors. “In the evening, I look out and they are gone, and then the concert starts.”

--
“We call them deaf, dumb and blind,” said the Ukrainian military nurse who ordered the observers out of her field hospital. She offered only her nickname, Romashka, a typical practice for soldiers here. “They know nothing. They see nothing. They are too soft.”

On a recent afternoon in Avdiivka, whose prewar population of 35,000 people has decreased by about half, monitors wrapped up at the close of business at 5 p.m., as usual. By and large confined to their hotels after dark, monitors say they pass the time watching television, surfing the internet or chatting with colleagues. They can listen for violations from inside the hotels.

The Russians even have forbidden the "deaf, dumb and blind" to use binoculars! :

Emblematic of the group’s weak hand, one key mission of observers stationed at two crossing posts on the Russian-Ukrainian border has conceded to Russian pressure not to use binoculars, lest the observers observe too much.

Read the entire New York Times article here.

Russia continues its aggression against Ukraine - EU is waging war against global warming

A European country, Ukraine, is being invaded by the the forces of an evil dictator, Vladimir Putin.

What is the the European Union - the self-proclaimed "soft superpower" - doing?

Answer:

The EU foreign ministers are wasting their time - and taxpayers´ money - on a huge "preventive diplomacy" campaign, "aimed at preventing future violent conflicts through cooperation and dialogue":

Europe is launching a major diplomatic push for an ambitious deal on global warming, mobilising A-list celebrities and tens of thousands of diplomats to exert “maximum pressure” on key countries in international climate negotiations.
The EU plan, endorsed by ministers on Monday in Brussels, will see 90,000 diplomats in over 3,000 missions lobbying to win new pledges on carbon cuts from countries ahead of a crunch UN climate summit in Paris this December.
European stars, of a calibre of US public figures such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Al Gore, will front a push to make climate action a “strategic priority” at G7, G20 and Major Economies Forum summits.
The action plan, seen by the Guardian, calls for a ‘Climate Action Day’ in June and a ‘100 days to Paris countdown’ event later in the year.
The aim is to raise the EU’s profile and cement alliances by winning new pledges for greenhouse gas cuts – intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) in UN jargon, the backbone of any deal in Paris – before June at the latest.
“The EU has enormous soft power and we must use that to push for an ambitious agenda in Paris,” the Danish foreign minister Martin Lidegaard told the Guardian. “I have urged my colleagues to commit to including climate diplomacy in their activities in the run up to COP21 [the Paris summit] – and the EU’s foreign service to work more on this. We should focus our efforts on the major growth economies and climate financing.”
A UK government spokesman described the diplomatic blitz as “a welcome step to ramp up European climate diplomacy globally”.
The action plan cites climate change as “a key element of preventive diplomacy,” aimed at preventing future violent conflicts through cooperation and dialogue. It also goes further than past EU communications, describing climate change as “a strategic threat affecting natural resource availability, economic stability and hence overall national and regional security”.

Of course the EU foreign ministers and their bosses are also going to adopt some new meaningless statements, and possibly even soft sanctions due to the continuing Russian aggression, but the clear priority of this "enormous soft power" will be to conduct a (senseless) propaganda war against irrelevant "climate change".

Putin's friend threatens the US: "Russia is the only country realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash"

The fact that Russian television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov is very close to dictator Vladimir Putin is scaring:

Reuters is reporting that a Kremlin-backed journalist has issued a stark warning to the United States about Moscow's nuclear capabilities as the White House threatened sanctions over Crimea's referendum on union with Russia.
"Russia is the only country in the world that is realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash," television presenter Dmitry Kiselyov said on his weekly current affairs show.
Behind him was a backdrop of a mushroom cloud following a nuclear blast.
Kiselyov was named by President Vladimir Putin in December as the head of a new state news agency whose task will be to portray Russia in the best possible light.

Source

Putin defends Stalin's brutal aggression against Finland

A Finnish ski patrol, lying in the snow on the outskirts of a wood in Northern Finland, on the alert for Russian troops, 12 January 1940.

Vladimir Putin, dictator of the mafia state called Russia, has again showed his true colors. In a speech to the Russian Military Historical Society at Novo-Ogaryovo, the former second rate KGB agent defended his idol Joseph Stalin's aggression in 1939 against a small neighboring country, Finland:

Russian President Vladimir Putin says that the Soviet Union launched the Winter War with Finland in order to “correct mistakes” that had been made when Finland gained its independence in 1917.
“The border was just 20 kilometres from St Petersburg and that was a significantly major threat to a city of five million”  

"Historian" Putin gets it wrong on all counts. The Finnish border was not 20 km from Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), but almost 40 km away. Of course Finland was no threat neither to Leningrad nor the Soviet Union. And the population of Leningrad was about 3,5 million at most, not five million. 

Putin's argument about the "correction" of the "mistakes" of 1917, when Finland gained its independence, is also revealing. Apparently Putin sees Finland's independence as a "mistake", which Stalin rightly tried to "correct". 

Russian historians, as opposed to Putin, are nowadays more familiar with the reality of the Winter War:
It was a war one of the sides involved would rather forget, while the other fights to keep the memory alive. Finns are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the start of the Winter War against the Soviet Union.

After months of ultimatums, on November 30, 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland.

With a sizeable advantage in manpower, tanks and aircraft, the Red Army command expected victory within weeks.

“We could not understand why. The Soviet Union was so big, so why would they take something from us?”says Lars Loflund, Finnish war veteran.

Just months earlier, the Soviet Union and Germany had signed a non-aggression pact, which contained a secret protocol dividing North and East Europe into spheres of influence. Finland fell under the USSR's.

That fitted in with Stalin's plan to expand the Soviet border from its second city of Leningrad. However, the Soviet Union had underestimated the Finns.

The Finnish Commander, General Mannerheim, had ordered the construction of a powerful line of fortifications. Although poorly equipped, the defenders knew the rugged terrain, and were better prepared for the plunging temperatures.

“In the conflict zone there were no roads, no settlements – just forests and lakes. Nothing to get your bearings from”, says Viktor Lavskiy, Russian War Veteran, adding, “The soldiers and the equipment were not ready, and the reconnaissance was insufficient.”

As losses mounted, the Soviets pumped more and more troops into the theater of conflict to finally break through the Finnish fortifications. Despite making inroads, the cost of the war was proving too high for the USSR.

On March 12, 1940, it accepted the offer of a ceasefire less than six months after the first shots were fired. While Finland ceded around a tenth of its territory, it retained its independence.

It had been a short but bloody war. Twenty-five thousand Finns were lost, but the number of Soviet casualties was up to five times that amount.

“During Soviet times, people were reluctant to even mention this war. It was difficult, not particularly successful, and however you try to spin it, the Soviet Union was the aggressor,” says Aleksandr Golubev, Historian from the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Even if Putin is wasting enormous sums of oil and gas money (which should be used for "correcting" the backwardness of the Russian society) on rebuilding the Russian army, he will fortunately not be in a position to "correct" the "mistakes" with regard to Finland. But it is important for Russia's neighbors - particularly the Baltic countries - to understand what kind of a person is in charge in Russia today. 

PS

The wars in Chechnia and Georgia are of course more recent examples of the policy of "correcting mistakes", favored by Putin. 

"Creative" warmist scientists finally find a way to show that global warming increases violent conflicts

"Global warming leads to wars and increasing violence" has been one the warmists' favorite propaganda claims already for years. The problem, though, is that this claim is not supported by serious studies. 

This is e.g. what Nils Petter Gleditsch, Centre for the Study of Civil War, PRIO & Norwegian University of Science and Technology, says in the summary of a recent study, "Whither the weather? Climate change and conflict", published in the Journal for Peace Research:

Overall, the research reported here offers only limited support for viewing climate change as an important influence on armed conflict. However, framing the climate issue as a security problem could possibly influence the perceptions of the actors and contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, now six creative scientists from the University of Colorado and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have finally found a way to get the results warmists have been longing for:

A study relating climate to conflict in East African nations finds that increased rainfall dampens conflict while unusually hot periods can cause a flare-up, reinforcing the theory that climate change will cause increased scarcity in the region. The study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

How have the six warmist authors been able to succeed where others have failed? 
The answer is: By using a new database, in which the criteria for violence have been "relaxed" in order to get the results that suited their needs:


Compared with other datasets with high battle
death thresholds, such as Correlates of War (threshold of 1,000
battle deaths/y) (3) or the Uppsala Conflict Data Program and
Peace Research Institute Oslo (UCDP/PRIO; threshold of 25
battle deaths/y), the criteria for including violence in the ACLED
data are relaxed (4). The number of deaths or amount of property
damage associated with violence was not recorded in ACLED
because of unreliable data reporting in news outlets. Furthermore,
setting a fixed death threshold often does not make sense, because
conflict emerging in the face of ecological stress might include
small-scale skirmishes resulting in few deaths or injuries. The
Correlates of War and UCDP/PRIO data record conflict only
where it takes place between the government of an internationally
recognized state and a cohesive rebel group. For our purposes, we
identify and code violence that is not perpetrated by organized
rebels or government forces; conflict often takes place between
two nonstate actors, such as communal groups.

(I would not be surprised if family quarrels are included in the new dataset)

But even with the manipulated criteria, not everything went according to the wishes of the creative scientists:

Nevertheless, the researchers stressed that the contribution of climate is minor compared with other economic, political and social factors, which also went in to their models and explained conflict far better than changes in precipitation or weather.

Read the entire article here