Millions of us might be **** if we ignore the Russian-Ukraine war

[Seenenough]

Gob
Don't wag that middle class finger at me, please.
My Dad was a mechanic, later a salesman.
Me a salesman too, them a pilot- but no bugger helped me make that jump.

You can kiss my ass, bloody Yarpy.

Don't give him the pleasure, Atom ,he seems to enjoy kissing Plumb's butt all day long

[Undried Plum]

Have the Septics given up on the line of the claimed invasion?

Has it really gone that bad, this year? Again? Again again? Again again again again? How many times again?

Yesterday was claimed to be D-day. It didn't happen. It won't happen today. It won't happen tomorrow. either.

Nor will it happen the next day or the day after that, nor will it it happen the day after that, nor the next day.

You have been hoaxed, boys and girls. Not for the first time, boys and girls, and not for the last time.

That **** is the gift the **** that keeps on giving, year after year after year.

Waking up to Reality has now become a derogatory term. Ignorance has become beyond acceptable in some other places where Ignorance, and its very close cousin Ignoreance, have both become normality in our dysfunctional society in Britain and elsewhere.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Gob
Don't wag that middle class finger at me, please.
My Dad was a mechanic, later a salesman.
Me a salesman too, them a pilot- but no bugger helped me make that jump.

You can kiss my ass, bloody Yarpy.

Don't give him the pleasure, Atom ,he seems to enjoy kissing Plumb's butt all day long

Plum is not an idiot like you...

[Seenenough]

Gob
Don't wag that middle class finger at me, please.
My Dad was a mechanic, later a salesman.
Me a salesman too, them a pilot- but no bugger helped me make that jump.

You can kiss my ass, bloody Yarpy.

Don't give him the pleasure, Atom ,he seems to enjoy kissing Plumb's butt all day long

Plum is not an idiot like you...

You are up late.

[TheGreenGoblin]

Don't give him the pleasure, Atom ,he seems to enjoy kissing Plumb's butt all day long

Plum is not an idiot like you...

You are up late.

I am...

[Undried Plum]

A US F-16 with the delightfully honest callsign of WarHawk12 is scooting about the skies of Rumania on FR24.

It's so funny to see the warmongers of NATO feeling the sands of War trickling between their fingers into dust.

Fukkem.

[John Hill]

Will he get an active service medal for that flight?

[Undried Plum]

Oh yes. They get medals for having a heartbeat and a shave.

[Undried Plum]

Forte 12 has turned around over Rumania and is buggering off back to Sicily. Mebbe the driver needs to point Percy at the porcelain or mebbe there's bugs on the windshield or mebbe Windows 11 has crashed and put up the blue screen of death. She's scooting back home along the breadcrumb trail that she left on the outbound leg.

Mebbe they've called off the War for another year and claimed Victory.

WarHawk 12 has landed for a piss and coffee and medals. War is hell y'know.

[John Hill]

Why are these military aircraft operating in a clearly obvious (i.e. visible) manner?

[k3k3]

Why are these military aircraft operating in a clearly obvious (i.e. visible) manner?

Until or unless the shooting starts it's safer that everbody knows where you are for deconfliction, reduces the workload for the accident investigators.

[Wodrick]

How long do these rivet joint things stay up or what is their endurance to be proper.

[Boac]

i would guess around 10 hours.

[k3k3]

Rivet Joint, AWACS etc. can easily fly ten hour missions and they can be air to air refuelled, the limiting factor is then crew duty times.

The longest E-3A mission I saw was over 16 hours.

As for endurance, the one that's up now is 57 years old. ;-)

[Boac]

[Wodrick]

As for endurance, the one that's up now is 57 years old. ;-)

Been reworked a bit though innit.

[Bob]

A message

[Boac]

https://www.airlive.net/ukraine-interna ... from-kyiv/

[FD2]

Now here's someone claiming that we shouldn't pay so much attention to Putin's games in Ukraine when we should also pay attention to what he's up to in Africa with his mercenary boys. I wonder what Russia Today or Moscow Centre will have to say about that... anyone?

Comment

Europe must beware: Putin's tentacles extend far beyond Ukraine

From Mali and Burkina Faso via the Central African Republic to Ethiopia, a huge swathe of sub-Saharan Africa is tilting towards Moscow

Mark Almond
17 February 2022 • 3:22pm
Mark Almond

“Stop thief” is what a pickpocket shouts to distract his victim. As fingers fish a wallet out of a jacket, the criminal points wildly in the opposite direction with his other arm. All eyes follow that signal missing the crime in full view.

Is Russia using its undoubted military build-up around Ukraine, at least in part, to draw Western attention away from its surging influence in sub-Saharan Africa?

Timbuktu has long been a by-word for an impossibly remote location. Despite a decade of French-led military intervention in Mali against IS-linked jihadis, it is fair to say that the Sahel region of Africa is as beyond most Europeans’ ken as it was in the days of Beau Geste. Everyone is familiar with maps of Russian deployments around Ukraine, but the little-noticed emergence of the Wagner Group of Russian mercenaries as a big player in Francophone Africa. This poses serious challenges to Europe too.

From its intervention in the mineral-rich Central African Republic to its contract with the military junta in Mali, the Russian mercenary Wagner Group is usurping the traditional terrain of the French Foreign Legion.

President Macron is winding up France’s military role in the anti-IS campaign because Mali’s military is cooperating with the Russians and ignoring the West’s calls for a return to civilian government.

From Mali and Burkina Faso via the Central African Republic to Ethiopia a huge swathe of sub-Saharan Africa is tilting towards Moscow.

This matters because with the Wagner Group acting as a deniable arms-length instrument of the Kremlin’s military influence, Europe loses its capacity to influence governance in this huge unstable region.

Radical Islamist terrorists, most notoriously the Manchester bomber, have been infiltrated into Europe from North Africa. The Russians may not like IS, but if its terrorism is directed against Europe it could be a useful distraction of the West from the Ukrainian crisis.

As the French-led Nato forces are pulled out of Mali partly to re-deploy to Nato’s eastern flank, the risk is that a vast swathe of Africa from Mali to Libya becomes either ungoverned or ruled by regimes hostile to Europe. Mass migration across the Mediterranean is destabilising for European politics. Just think how all four plausible candidates for the French presidential election in April, including the favourite President Macron, have made immigration control a key theme.

Remember how last autumn, Moscow’s ally in Belarus manufactured a refugee crisis on its borders with Poland. President Lukashenko let thousands of would-be immigrant to the EU fly visa-free to his country. Then he pushed them towards the frontier with the EU.

What if a Malian or Libyan “Lukashenko” is prodded by Moscow to facilitate a similar migrant crisis for Italy and Spain?

Let’s face it in north-west Africa there is a genuine population pressure pushing countless young men especially to head north to try their luck in the EU. Growing numbers of teenagers with no job prospects across the Sahel region south of the Sahara creates a natural reservoir of would-be migrants.

But they need states to open their borders to their transit and turn a blind eye to the people smugglers shipping them over the Mediterranean.

Releasing waves of young Muslims who might be tempted to join the radical jihadis at home to flood northwards is a safety valve for the military regimes in the Sahel. They know that the Wagner Group is hardly more likely to suppress insurrection at home than the French. But France and the EU wanted them to block migration. Moscow will welcome its impact on the EU.

While Europe looks east at the genuine threat of war over Ukraine, its soft Mediterranean underbelly looks less secure by the day. A sudden disruptive surge of mass immigration from North Africa could cause internal destabilisation in Nato’s European allies, including France. This gives Moscow an opportunity to raise the stakes in Eastern Europe suddenly if Western attention suddenly swings back south.

[Seenenough]

Quite similar here in the US.While the focus is on the Ukraine every bloke and his dog pours in over the southern border with Mexico.