"The 1980's are calling to ask for their foreign policy back."

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/...estern-leaders-to-bolster-support-for-ukraine

Hungary voted to allow Sweden to join NATO.

https://thehill.com/policy/international/4489815-swedens-nato-bid-hungarian-parliament-approval/

How does that work without prompting a wider war?

1) Best guess, bluster.

2) By troops they mean allied defense systems and personnel moving into western Ukraine freeing up their air defense to move to Kyiv and the east. Basically a loan and not a gift of western air defense (and also daring Russia to try).

Addendum. If allied air defenses were providing cover I could also see more NATO and/or joint instruction training happening IN Ukraine. Much simpler than transporting them to the Netherlands and back.

Also one of the lessons learned from last year’s offensive was that certain areas of training were missing in some NATO countries due to safety and just the kind of warfare they are experienced with. One country I forget only used training grenades and only one day. For infantry! Whereas in the kind of trench warfare Ukraine is fighting they are a necessity.

What do you think happens if/when some of these NATO personnel are killed?

Ukrainians get some nice, big, long range weapons to hit back.

Again, it’s a dare.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europ...-prevent-spillover-polish-fm-says-2024-02-26/

WASHINGTON (AP) — Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Tuesday offered her strongest public support yet for the idea of liquidating roughly $300 billion in frozen Russian Central Bank assets and using them for Ukraine’s long-term reconstruction.

“It is necessary and urgent for our coalition to find a way to unlock the value of these immobilized assets to support Ukraine’s continued resistance and long-term reconstruction,” Yellen said in remarks in Sao Paulo, Brazil, where Group of 20 finance ministers and central bank governors are meeting this week.

Same as now. There are plenty of NATO personnel already there observing and keeping an eye on supplied equipment.

Troops won't be going in. Macron, like the petulant child he is, likes to seek attention, which is what he's doing here. Politically, he's the equivalent of that person in, or around, everyone's social circle who can't go ten minutes without making things about them.

At home things aren't going very well with him, so enjoys getting a bit of limelight on the international stage - none of those annoying French people who fail to see his obvious magnificence...

https://news.postimees.ee/7969423/1...e-assistance-to-ukraine-to-continue-its-fight

Air Force: Ukraine downs another Russian Su-34 jet

That's the second one today.

US considering using our own stockpiles to supply Ukraine while waiting for funding bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/us/politics/ukraine-weapons-pentagon.html

I’ve been saying this for a while. I get that it’s always better to have ammo you don’t need than to need ammo you don’t have so DoD estimates are always conservative but you can be TOO conservative.

Especially if it turns out the enemy force you were preparing for turned out to be vastly inferior even before the war and has since been degraded to the point they are getting ammo from North Korea and refurbishing 60+ year old tanks.

A little now can go a long way to not only keep a free country out from under Putin’s boot but also continuing to degrade that enemy force (degraded enough and if Europe keeps rearming we can FINALLY pivot to Asia).

R co-chair of Problem Solvers Caucus preparing Discharge Petition for Ukraine aid.

https://www.axios.com/2024/02/29/house-republican-ukraine-aid-discharge-petition

Honestly if I were Mike Johnson behind the scenes I’d be begging every anti-Putin/pro-American R left to sign on ASAP and get this hot potato out of the House without giving the Chaos Caucus an excuse to Vacate the Chair.

I dunno why they're waiting so long using that half trillion we took from Putin and his oligarchs.
Stab a tap into that keg, and let's go.

Is he not a member of the Crazy Caucus?

Good point. I meant Chaos Caucus. They are happy blowing up government.

I think Mike wants to keep the government just wants it to be a theocratic one.

Legally speaking it is a very different thing to seize the wealth of individuals v a state.

https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/putin-recycled-rationalizations

So if the Kremlin wasn't buying its own narrative, it was renting it instead?

Not saying that it should be off the table, but confiscating assets is a double-edged sword. It erodes worldwide trust that assets stored in your banking system (for example) are inviolable and will cause others to believe that they are not secure and to look for alternatives. This is why it doesn't happen very often, even in the midst of major wars. Efforts are already underway to de-dollarise and to provide a Chinese-central alternative to the essentially US-run world financial system, and this will likely accelerate that.

Of course, the way to avoid this is to have these things decided multilaterally rather than just to be in the gift of the United States, but obviously there is no interest in that.

Finland’s defense minister urges Kyiv to use their donated missiles to strike into Russia.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/nato-ally-tells-ukraine-to-cross-putins-red-line/ar-BB1j8ayM

It's clearly still BS, but the historical context for Russians when referring to Nazis is more about a European group that is aggressively anti-Russian.

In WW2 as the Nazis spread west they at least tried to pay lip service to coming in and taking over, but leaving the original populations in place apart from their various genocidal cleansing campaigns.

In the East it was more of a kill em all approach from the start.

And appropriately, Germany have just handed Putin some propaganda material by discussing transfer of cruise missiles to Ukraine (which they explicitly mention could hit the Kerch Bridge) on an unsecured video conferencing app (Webex).

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68467329

Ukraine war: Russian ship damaged in Black Sea drone attack, Kyiv says

https://apnews.com/video/arctic-nor...nment-norway-278911ea6e4c4fd0899800a2ec64e116

Sweden has more balls than modern Republicans.
Let that sink in.

Swedish meatballs of course.

Breen, motherfucker.