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Posted

Sky News reports that Britain, at the "Ramstein" format meeting, announced the allocation of a large air defence aid package to Ukraine worth nearly €685 million. British Defence Secretary John Healey said that Kyiv will receive air defence systems, missiles, and automated turrets for shooting down drones.

Ukraine war latest: Zelenskyy addresses diplomats in The Hague - as Kremlin responds to latest peace talks | World News | Sky News

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Posted

I cannot help but think this war is being drug out for a reason. Ukraine doesn't get everything it needs; weapons are trickled to them at just the perfect rate to keep things in gridlock. Also, nothing is being done to stop other countries from buying Russian oil and gas. China and India are funding this and they seem to have little or no disincentive. Those that are more informed and follow more closely can maybe elaborate on this. 

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Posted
7 minutes ago, texashorne said:

Also, nothing is being done to stop other countries from buying Russian oil and gas.

Other than the severe international sanctions…and the political pressure…and the increased inspections by nations looking for (and stoping) shadow fleet tankers..,and the actual sinking of shadow fleet tankers you mean?

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Posted
1 minute ago, Gatorubet said:

Other than the severe international sanctions…and the political pressure…and the increased inspections by nations looking for (and stoping) shadow fleet tankers..,and the actual sinking of shadow fleet tankers you mean?

Sanctions on India and China? 

Posted (edited)
32 minutes ago, texashorne said:

Sanctions on India and China? 

IMG_1192.gif.d3124311014646f0eedf259868eb1c73.gif

No offense, but most who follow this thread have spent years following the war rather closely, and if you have no idea what’s going on, you should go back six months and start binging the thread.     It’s like popping up in the football thread and then asking if people could explain what conferences various teams are in.  

I mean, it is certainly a legitimate non-trollish question, but also sort of a thread derail asking for the most basic information when you have AI on your phone and in five seconds you can have those answers.

Edit: my response sounded far more dick-ish than I intended. My apologies.   This is the answer to my 10 second question to my phone. “Why is nothing being done to stop the sale of oil from Russia to China and India?”

Quote

Sales of Russian oil to China and India continue because both nations prioritize their 

energy security and economic interestsby purchasing heavily discounted crude, and the international community faces challenges in enforcing sanctions that would cause global price spikes and economic disruption. However, Western nations are currently implementing new, more assertive measures to curb this trade. 

Why Sales Continue

Economic Advantage: Russian oil trades at a steep discount to global benchmarks, which provides significant savings for energy-hungry economies like India and China. For India, with its large population and economy sensitive to oil prices, this discount is a strategic imperative.

Sovereign Interests: Both India and China assert their right to make independent trade decisions based on their national interests and resist external pressure on their energy policies.

Avoidance Mechanisms: Russia has developed a large "shadow fleet" of older tankers and alternative insurance mechanisms to bypass Western-controlled shipping and insurance services, making the trade harder to track and sanction effectively.

Geopolitical Complexities: The U.S. and its allies are hesitant to impose full secondary sanctions that would penalize major financial institutions and companies in China and India, fearing a potential global trade war and the disruption of the global oil supply chain, which could lead to significant price spikes. 

Actions Being Taken

Western nations are actively working to disrupt this trade, with new measures announced and implemented in late 2025: 

U.S. Sanctions: In October 2025, the U.S. imposed sweeping sanctions on Russia's two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, and threatened secondary sanctions on foreign entities that continue to do business with them. This has prompted some Indian and Chinese refiners to temporarily pause or recalibrate their purchases.

EU and UK Measures:

The EU and UK have sanctioned specific oil traders and vessels involved in Russia's "shadow fleet" to disrupt the transportation network.

Crucially, new rules taking effect in January 2026 will ban the import of refined products made from any Russian crude, regardless of where they were processed. This is expected to significantly impact major refiners in India and Turkey who export refined products to Europe.

The EU also targeted a Chinese refiner for the first time for importing Russian oil, leveraging access to its valuable market to deter major refiners from future imports.

Tariff Pressure: The U.S. has imposed substantial tariffs on Indian goods as a penalty for its continued oil trade with Russia and President Trump has urged G7 partners to consider tariffs of up to 100% on Chinese and Indian goods in an attempt to pressure them further. 

These ongoing efforts aim to increase the costs and risks for companies dealing with Russian oil, with the goal of ultimately cutting into Moscow's oil revenues

 

Edited by Gatorubet
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Posted
1 hour ago, atomheartbevo said:

The negotiations are just a fucking scam by the Russians to play other countries.

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Good.  Maybe this will be when that fucking guy gets it through his thick FIFA peace prize winning skull that Russia doesn't want to make a deal.  

I doubt it, but still.  

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Gatorubet said:

IMG_1192.gif.d3124311014646f0eedf259868eb1c73.gif

No offense, but most who follow this thread have spent years following the war rather closely, and if you have no idea what’s going on, you should go back six months and start binging the thread.     It’s like popping up in the football thread and then asking if people could explain what conferences various teams are in.  

I mean, it is certainly a legitimate non-trollish question, but also sort of a thread derail asking for the most basic information when you have AI on your phone and in five seconds you can have those answers.

Edit: my response sounded far more dick-ish than I intended. My apologies.   This is the answer to my 10 second question to my phone. “Why is nothing being done to stop the sale of oil from Russia to China and India?”

 

I fully expected a response like this so no worries (it's surly) And I have followed this thread and have pulled up chatgpt to see what countries are still buying Russian energy. It's still there, notably China and India. I don't think the actions taken against these countries is aggressive enough, and I don't think the aid given to Ukraine by all countries is substantial. I think this war could be over quickly, but the world isn't allowing it to happen for whatever reason. 

Edited by texashorne
Posted
On 12/14/2025 at 4:09 PM, Gatorubet said:

@PTINS - i’d love to hear your thoughts on a subject I know nothing about.   I find it interesting that the city of Angarsk in Siberia - a larger city of 200,000 residents - has been largely without any building heating since December 7.  This includes homes, apartments, hospitals, schools, etc.  When the heat went out, the temperature was -20.     Today on December 14th the heat is still out,

Angarsk had a recent heat wave, so the highs are in the teens and low 20s, while trending colder at the end of the week.  That said, if the temperature remains below zero for a week straight, that city’s residents are living in an icebox.

This news jogged my memory about another fact I read recently, that all of the Ukrainian attacks on the refineries have prevented the refineries from planned outages to transition to winter fuel, fuel that contains the necessary ingredient to prevent fuel freezing and gelling or doing whatever it is fuel does without those ingredients. 

If that inability to refine winterized gas is true and continues into the December and January winter months, what effect will that have on transportation in the country?  IOW, what can you tell my ignorant self about the absence of winterized refined fuel in a country so cold - and the consequences to the countries’s economy and the military operation in Ukraine?

 

These are two similar, but unrelated issues; A power plant going down, and refinery operations.

There was accident at the Angarsk Irkutsk-9 Combine Heat Power Plant, a 540 MW coal fired facility that provides power and heat to both the city (250,000+) and the Rosneft-Angarsk Refinery (200,000 BPD) co-located at the sight. Angarsk is 3,000 miles from Moscow, and ~ 150 miles north of the central Mongolia, in the middle of nowhere, and I mean nowhere. 

The Power Plant has 6 units, (capacity of 330 MW), that were built from 1963-69, and 2 units (capacity 210 MW) that were built in the early '80's. It is possible new natural gas fired boilers were added in the last 5 years, but nothing shows any newer additions.

An accident occurred on December 7 when a boiler unit at the plant failed, and another boiler was reportedly shut down due to a malfunction a day earlier. Boiler accidents in the US are rare. In Russia, ??? depending on 60-70 year old boilers is not a comforting feeling.

"It was reported that all services are on high alert. The emergency regime has been introduced in the Angarsk district in connection with the accident at CHPP-9. Heat supply is limited in 1,546 apartment buildings housing more than 167,000 people and 121 socially significant facilities," the local mayor's office said in a statement."

"On Dec. 1, hundreds of motorists were stranded on a stretch of the Baikal Highway, part of the Trans-Siberian Highway, after three days of severe weather brought temperatures near minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 Fahrenheit), heavy snowfall and strong winds. At its peak, the jam stretched roughly 100 kilometers (62 miles) along the southwestern shore of Lake Baikal (~ 50 miles from Angarsk). Some drivers, including families with children, reported running low on fuel, water and food."

The logistics chain is always critical, and in remote areas, with minimal infrastructure, during extreme weather conditions, good luck with that. I would think any available power is moving towards the west (Moscow), not the east (Siberia). After 3 years of war and reduced energy availability, there are probably many localized areas that are one event away from a similar situation. One thing they have in their favor, they come from heartier stock than the average Austinite person.

The refinery operations is something different.

Refinery turnarounds (long term scheduled maintenance, including shut downs, every 4-6 years) are necessary, but often postponed or delayed for any number of reasons, a war being one of them.  It is not necessary to shut down the refinery to change the qualities of the products produced. US refineries do it twice a year to transition from the winter blends to the summer blends for gasoline and other transportation fuels.

I am not familiar with the different fuel blends for the northern climates. 3 years of attacks on Russian refineries and gas plants, has probably reduced the availability of some of the blending stocks (lighter weight, more volatile) Russia may use in gasoline blending. I know alcohol is an option, but that consumption is prioritized in other areas.

Generally, aviation fuel (Kerosine) is a cleaner, filtered diesel that is better in extreme cold. But Diesel has better lubrication properties, so it is better for engines with more moving parts, like car engines v. jet turbines.  

I would expect the quality control on Russian refined products is poor, especially so for the domestic market. But I'm sure the average Russian has been though similar circumstances before and the black market is able to meet the demand. 

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Posted (edited)
49 minutes ago, texashorne said:

I fully expected a response like this so no worries (it's surly) And I have followed this thread and have pulled up chatgpt to see what countries are still buying Russian energy. It's still there, notably China and India. I don't think the actions taken against these countries is aggressive enough, and I don't think the aid given to Ukraine by all countries is substantial. I think this war could be over quickly, but the world isn't allowing it to happen for whatever reason. 

The reason is that there hasn't been enough collective pain outside of Ukraine.  The pain is theoretical.  Specifically, with the US, there hasn't been a large scale compelling reason sold to the people of the US as to why we should intervene substantially in this war.  That will not happen in the next three years, given the current admin.  That's just a fact.  And it may be that our people as a whole are too ignorant or plain stupid to get it.  But this isn't a problem unique to our times.

Recall that "America First" was a pre-WWII thing.  People were adamant that Hitler was Europe's problem.  We didn't enter the war in Europe until we were attacked - by the Japanese.  Entering the war in Europe was just a tag on to that because Japan was aligned with Germany and Italy.  This was a recognition by FDR's admin that getting involved in a European war was a politically dicey proposition for him.  The current admin and much of the American electorate stand in the same posture today.  The lessons of 1933-45 have been mostly forgotten, except for followers of history.  Very few who were alive then are left to tell the tale.  While that is sad, it is understandable.  What is crazy to me, is the position the US has gained as a world power since 1945 - that is the world order that was formed as a result of WWII that has allowed us to become the richest, most powerful nation on earth - is being tossed away because a bunch of know-nothings have decided that this whole post 1945 order that we built to benefit ourselves, but also benefits others - benefits those others too much for contemporary tastes.  It's self inflicted empire destruction.  

tl;dr - It isn't happening because history repeats itself, and that includes Americans being insular and unconcerned about what takes place abroad. 

Edited by Chad Fuck
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Posted

The first part I agree with. The second part, I’m not so sure about. There are real dangers and real expenses to being the world’s police force. Yes, we gain a lot of power and influence but is it worth the financial cost and the wrath of the countrymen from the countries that we have to police? We’ve already squandered a lot of the financial success that we gained by rebuilding Japan and Europe, how much more money are we going to have to collect or print to maintain wa world police presence. 

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Posted
The first part I agree with. The second part, I’m not so sure about. There are real dangers and real expenses to being the world’s police force. Yes, we gain a lot of power and influence but is it worth the financial cost and the wrath of the countrymen from the countries that we have to police? We’ve already squandered a lot of the financial success that we gained by rebuilding Japan and Europe, how much more money are we going to have to collect or print to maintain wa world police presence. 

Where did I suggest we should be the worlds police force?

That’s a whole other discussion.
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Posted
3 hours ago, Chad Fuck said:

The reason is that there hasn't been enough collective pain outside of Ukraine.  The pain is theoretical.  Specifically, with the US, there hasn't been a large scale compelling reason sold to the people of the US as to why we should intervene substantially in this war.  That will not happen in the next three years, given the current admin.  That's just a fact.  And it may be that our people as a whole are too ignorant or plain stupid to get it.  But this isn't a problem unique to our times.

Recall that "America First" was a pre-WWII thing.  People were adamant that Hitler was Europe's problem.  We didn't enter the war in Europe until we were attacked - by the Japanese.  Entering the war in Europe was just a tag on to that because Japan was aligned with Germany and Italy.  This was a recognition by FDR's admin that getting involved in a European war was a politically dicey proposition for him.  The current admin and much of the American electorate stand in the same posture today.  The lessons of 1933-45 have been mostly forgotten, except for followers of history.  Very few who were alive then are left to tell the tale.  While that is sad, it is understandable.  What is crazy to me, is the position the US has gained as a world power since 1945 - that is the world order that was formed as a result of WWII that has allowed us to become the richest, most powerful nation on earth - is being tossed away because a bunch of know-nothings have decided that this whole post 1945 order that we built to benefit ourselves, but also benefits others - benefits those others too much for contemporary tastes.  It's self inflicted empire destruction.  

tl;dr - It isn't happening because history repeats itself, and that includes Americans being insular and unconcerned about what takes place abroad. 

We did run Lend Lease. 

Posted
33 minutes ago, Chad Fuck said:


Where did I suggest we should be the worlds police force?

That’s a whole other discussion.


I probably misinterpreted your point a bit. And I agree that acting as the world’s police force is a huge tangent for another thread.

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