What war could mean for life in modern Britain

Andrey Kelin told Times  Radio on Friday that any measure the UK took against Moscow would be met with an equal response, but he refused to give further detail on how this could look. The individuals concerned are Gennady Timchenko, Boris Rotenberg, and Igor Rotenberg, all oligarchs who Mr Johnson described as “cronies” of the Russian president. Rossiya, IS Bank, General Bank, Promsvyazbank and the Black Sea Ban are the banks in question. Russia’s actions have drawn widespread condemnation from the West, including from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who addressed the UK with a televised statement on Thursday.

Turkey will get 40 new F-16s and upgrades to 79 of the jets in its existing fleet, the state department said in a news release. One person was killed and another injured in Russian drone strikes in Beryslav, said Oleksandr Prokudin, regional governor of Kherson oblast. But the House speaker, Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said the legislation would be “dead on arrival in the House” in its current form, according to a letter to Republican lawmakers.  https://euronewstop.co.uk/world-war-iii-begins-with-forgetting.html  has ruled out any move towards conscription, saying the army service will remain voluntary.

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After 2,000 anti-tank weapons were delivered last week and 30 British troops arrived to teach Ukrainian forces how to use them, the phrase "God Save the Queen" began trending on Twitter in Ukraine. Some bars and restaurants in Kyiv were offering free drinks to anyone who had a UK passport. Opposition leaders including Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer criticised the initial package of sanctions for being too soft.

• Gershkovich was detained while on a reporting trip to the Russian city of Yekaterinburg, about 2,000km (1,200 miles) east of Moscow.
• The situation has resulted in contacts being terminated for political reasons as a result of changing attitudes towards Russia as a whole.
• “This represents a continuation of Russia’s minor incremental gains whilst Ukraine focuses on active defence,” the report reads.
• Western intelligence officials concluded that the incident fitted into a pattern of Russia widening its military activities to involve attacks on infrastructure underpinning Western economic and energy security.
• "The document referred to in the Financial Times article is a background note written by the secretariat of the council under its own responsibility which describes the current status of the Hungarian economy," the statement by the senior EU official said.

He said on Twitter he would also speak to his fellow G7 leaders and called for an urgent meeting of all Nato leaders as soon as possible. He chaired an emergency Cobra meeting earlier and will give a televised statement later on the UK's response to Russia's "unprovoked attack". The Foreign Office has warned against all travel to Crimea and two areas of eastern Ukraine, Donetsk oblast and Luhansk oblast. It comes as the UK has said that tougher sanctions against Russia in the event of an invasion of Ukraine will mean “a much broader range of individuals and businesses can be sanctioned due to their significance to the Kremlin”. “I put forward the UK’s point of view on the current situation as well as seeking to deter Russia from an invasion of Ukraine,” she said. He said the intelligence on the prospect of an invasion was “grim”, but added that he did not believe Vladimir Putin had made a decision on whether to act.

Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

Sadly, many of these relations have been strained in recent years due to the Putin government’s hostility towards Ukraine and the Russian media’s relentless and baseless attacks on Ukrainians. The situation has resulted in contacts being terminated for political reasons as a result of changing attitudes towards Russia as a whole. Putin is seeking to turn back the clock to a time when the Soviet Union and the West had defined and relatively stable “spheres of influence” in Europe.

After Finland joined Nato at record speed last April, he believes the country is entering “a new age in Finnish foreign policy”. He remains the frontrunner but polls have recently tightened between  the top three candidates. Stubb’s lead over the former foreign minister and Green candidate Pekka Haavisto has slimmed and Jussi Halla-aho, of the far-right Finns party, is catching up in third. A US Senate deal to secure further aid to Ukraine is in danger of collapsing, according to lawmakers.

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True Russian cyberwarfare capabilities have proved something of a damp squib in Ukraine. Far from crippling the entire national infrastructure, the worst they are known to have done is briefly disrupt power and mobile phone networks. That, though, is partly because Ukraine had already learnt from previous Russian cyberattacks over the past decade. Britain has also allowed ammunition supplies to dwindle to “dangerously low levels,” according to a Parliamentary Defence Committee report. Gen Sir Richard Barrons, the former head of the British Joint Forces Command, told the committee that he doubted there were “sufficient munitions to sustain a high-intensity conflict for more than about a week”.

• The conflict in Ukraine offers a glimpse of how Britain might prepare for self-defence.
• In video shared by state news agency Ria Novosti, Gershkovich was shown listening to the ruling, standing in a court cage wearing a hooded top and light blue jeans.
• For many Ukrainians, especially in the south and eastern regions of the country, Russian is the first language.
• Conservative backbencher Alicia Kearns tweeted on Thursday that the Government should consider cyber attacks on Russia if Mr Putin does not withdraw troops.
• On Thursday the investigative committee said preliminary findings showed the plane was struck by a surface-to-air missile fired from Ukraine.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has pledged to make the findings of Moscow’s crash investigation public. Local authorities in Belgorod, which borders Ukraine, said the crash killed all 74 people on board, including six crew members and three Russian servicemen. Social media users in the Belgorod region posted videos that showed a plane falling from the sky in a snowy, rural area and a huge ball of fire erupting where it allegedly hit the ground. The US is planning to station nuclear weapons in the UK for the first time in 15 years amid a growing threat from Russia, according to a report. Warheads three times as strong as the Hiroshima bomb would be located at RAF Lakenheath in Suffolk under the proposals, the Daily Telegraph reported.

But efforts to deal with the issue has recently encountered growing opposition among Republicans aligned with Donald Trump. Analysts have said that Moscow may be using jailed Americans as bargaining chips after US-Russian tensions soared when Russia sent troops into Ukraine. At least two US citizens arrested in Russia in recent years, including WNBA star Brittney Griner, have been exchanged for Russians jailed in the US. So they’re fighting for us and that’s why I believe that we need to be ramping up the production of weapons and ammunition in this country in order to make sure that they get the equipment that they require at this time. We are definitely inviting China to participate in the summit, at the highest level, at the level of the president of the People’s Republic of China. Ukraine has invited Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, to participate in peace talks, Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s top adviser has said.

The UK and our allies condemn the Russian government’s unprovoked and premeditated invasion of Ukraine. The UK stands with Ukraine, its democratically-elected government and its brave people at this awful time. This shift in approach to resourcing Russia and Ukraine is noticeable, and the UK can consider its response to the war so far a diplomatic success. Forces are on standby in eastern Europe, and Nato is working with Ukraine to modernise its forces and protect it against cyber attacks.

The UK has been vocal in its support for Ukraine against Russian aggression, providing military aid and announcing sanctions on Russian banks and oligarchs. Russia might use the crisis to launch cyber and other hybrid attacks on Nato countries. It could even send troops to the three Baltic countries - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.

• Since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, the UK has sanctioned around 183 individuals under the Russia sanctions regime.
• Russian authorities haven’t detailed any evidence to support the espionage charges.
• Nato has a strong partnership with Ukraine (even though the country is not an official member) so it’s not surprising prime minister Boris Johnson has also joined in with Western allies in calling for an immediate de-escalation from Putin.
• Around half of the embassy’s personnel are understood to still be in the country.
• At the height of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union — the two great military powers in the world — engaged in a titanic ideological struggle by means of subversion, propaganda campaigns and proxy wars in the developing world.

Peter Ricketts, the UK’s former national security adviser, joined us to discuss the Ukraine crisis. The war has strengthened political consensus that domestic renewables offer the cheapest and most secure form of energy. Around 350 Royal Marines from 45 Commando were sent to Poland this week – taking the total numbers of military personnel there up to 500 – as the two countries continue to work together to try and de-escalate the tensions around Ukraine. Russian president Vladimir Putin wants to assert his power over the neighbouring country of Ukraine because he believes they should both be under the same sphere of influence, as they were both part of the Soviet Union in the 20th Century. An additional battlegroup of 850 troops has also begun deploying to Estonia over the past week, and 350 Royal Marines have been sent to Poland to reinforce the light cavalry squadron already stationed there. Although the UK has no troops stationed in Ukraine, it has contributed resources to Nato’s presence in the wider region.