JJE comments

Hang on... back to the article and topic.

The USN and USCG (and other maritime forces) forcibly board vessels all around the world every single day., frequently with warning shots fired. Seizures and worse.

Does that constitute" a*n act of piracy and a crime against civilian vessels of a third country in the waters of other states"?*

EFDToday  10:46 am JST

Delusional is the train of thought if one has arrived at the fiction that China is taking NATO's side. This is not tragedy but comedy.

Cards fanToday  10:41 am JST

There was no coup for starters.

And even if there were...

Get your narrative straight. Deny it then openly admit it within two short sentences.

Free cookies anyone?

The guy begging for change outside of the train station has sovereignty - not those scumbags who are milking it and sacrificing their own, destroying the country and managing to lose 1/6 of territory and a quarter of the population, while demanding others pay the bill while pretending that light is at the end of the tunnel.

I dare Kyiv to hit third party flagged freighters bound for Russia's BS ports.

Double dare to hit a Chinese, Indian, South African, South American and/or NAM vessel.

Triple dare: hit the freighters transporting free grain and fertilizer to Africa and beyond.

Kyiv is trying desperately to shut this down. The following is unfolding:

1) using insignificant EW capability to jam that frequency

2) making a fake video

3) pretending the conscripts don't have nationalist blocking regiments behind them

4) counter offensive is anything but a debacle

149.200, Volga.

Digital radio frequency (149.2 MHz).

Anyone who wishes to not fight can get on the radio and say "Volga" - free quarter will be given.

Spread the word. Save your life Slavic brothers. 100s have made the correct decision in the last 48+ hours.

That area (NW BS coordinates previously published) including the Danube Delta is a declared zone.

The few small ships tried sneak into Izmail - provoked an immediate response.

All ships are considered to be moving arms or worse.

Skippers, don't risk it.

The rescue operation was bungled.

Yokota monitored and communicated with JAL 123 as it weaved in and out of controlled air space. Located by overflight within 20 mins, twin hueys dispatched were told to stand down by Tokyo.

Most survivors died that night.

The then unborn daughter of a British woman whose father was on that plane has a compelling story to tell. She is a musician now (with much regard to the grandmother who never forgot).

Can't anyone see it?

The irony of this UN pronouncement by this cabal is that it does not include the actual country involved - Georgia.

The truth is the civil war in the early 90s and the disastrous consequences has plagued the country since then. And they don't want to go down the Kyiv path because they have already tried that one. Fortunately they are trying to unscramble the egg with positive action in what is still a fragmented society (even among the non-separatists). They deserve the chance to mend their society and hopefully peace and prosperity, not NATO hand-me-downs to become a pawn on a chessboard. Economic relations have greatly improved with neighboring countries, even their own breakaway ones.

The architect of the 2008 war, Mikheil Saakashvili, is in jail. He moved to Ukraine and Peroshenko appointed him governor of Odessa Oblast - where he got to work oppressing ethnic Ukrainian-Russians. His fell out with the Kyiv government in 2017 but was rehabilitated in 2019 by the current guy. His return to Georgia in an attempt to gain power saw him arrested and jailed, because he believed his own propaganda that he had popular support when in fact he is despised.

Peter14Today  06:21 pm JST

It is only the fact Russia made itself a pariah by invading a European neighbor causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions misplaced and it continues after a year and a half, that the cooperation has become untenable going forward.

It's a shame that this standard doesn't apply to all.

Peter14Today  05:44 pm JST

Let's not forget that since the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 and the subsequent suspension of the STS program (with the loss of two out of five shuttles and fourteen crew for a Vehicle Failure Rate of 40%) saw the Russian Soyuz MS orbital vehicle almost exclusively resupply and exclusively re-crew the ISS for almost 20 years.

It's important to understand the actual history there, in particular the Georgian Civil War 91-93 that featured many breakaway regions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_Civil_War

kintsugiToday  04:46 pm JST

The South Ossetia and Abkhazia conflicts were started by Georgia. The immediate cause of the conflict in those places was Zviad Gamsakhurdia and the oppression of the ethnic Abkhazians and South Ossetians there for the preceding decade.

kintsugiToday  04:37 pm JST

Albania was centrally involved. It along with the US/UK etc armed the KLA separatists and used Albanian territory to conduct their little-green-men mission.

Even more mendaciously, these six countries include collaborator Albania and the other principal offenders (US, UK, France) that shamelessly bombed and invaded Serbia to break that little country apart.

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black!

These are the same Usual Suspects who took Kosovo away from Serbia down the barrel of a gun.

Double standards!

Larr FlintToday  11:12 am JST

Actually the Tiangong space station is a permanently manned station operated by China.

However the China and Russia space programs are cooperating much more closely. Luna 25 is part of the International Lunar Research Station program, announced in 2021, which will see a China/Russia moon base established in conjunction with other countries who wish to participate. So far the UAE, Pakistan and Venezuela have signed on with Malaysia and others getting onboard soon.

Keep in mind these countries have been locked out by the US in other programs.

Even more controversial are the so-called Artemis Accords, which the US is using to unilaterally bypass the Outer Space Treaty, under the aegis of "partners" who have been collared into colluding, that seeks to commercialize and privatize space resources for US private companies and Uncle Sam - like they have a special right to take their neo-colonialist attitude into space.

A new space race is on!

Update - Roscocmos just announced that Luna 25 will land on the moon on August 21.

That was brilliant. The downward pointed cameras attached to the rocket give an amazing perspective.

Afterwards on the Roscosmos TV broadcast they put on a rock-jazz-band for a live concert-song complete with saxophone and the works. In the background of the stage was the famous photo of a smiling Yuri Gagarin holding a dove. The comments section went bananas, with many Indians and people from all over positively commenting.

Reports are still coming in that everything went smoothly.

Blast off!

YouTube: Roscosmos TV also has a live broadcast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgi2pIFrnW4

LUNA 25 launch broadcast is live now. About 42 mins to launch (I think). The water vapor clouds are swirling around the Soyuz rocket indicating it's fuelled.

It can be viewed on RT and other channels.

This is a natural sequel:

On 18 August 1976, the Soviet Luna 24 probe landed at Mare Crisium, took samples from the depths of 118, 143, and 184 cm of the lunar regolith, and returned them to Earth. In February 1978, it was published that laboratory analysis of these samples shown they contained 0.1% water by mass.

Fingers crossed the Indian and Russian missions succeed and contribute to the betterment of our understanding of space.

Space exploration belongs to all countries and all mankind.

Secondly, let's examine the state of the Russian nuclear industry worldwide.

Atomstroyexport (a subsidiary of Rosatom) recently almost finished construction of the enormous Akkuyu Nuclear Power Plant in Turkey and will be run by the latter organization.

This is the tip of the iceberg - dozens of plants and/or reactors are in the planning or construction phase around the world. it currently operates plants in 11 countries. It exports more reactors than all the other countries that export units combined.

It domines the processing of raw Uranium into fuel, the conversion and refinement processes, with an almost staggering 50% capacity (exceeding the US, UK France, Germany and the Netherlands combined). The only country that is projected to even begin to catch-up to this in the next decade is China.

Hungary is a good example of a country putting its national interests first - it has refused to cut itself off from cheap Russian energy and hurt itself.

Even Ukraine is in talks to buy Russian reactors from Bulgaria (the status of this deal is somewhat sketchy as obviously the money will come from Washington DC).

This only scratches the surface.

First, let's examine the practice of European countries "weaning" themselves of abundant, relatively cheap and geographically close energy resources from Russia, to exchange them for American or other products.

The gas industry is the yardstick. Since voluntarily cutting themselves off (and not so voluntarily when the Nord Stream II was sabotaged) the prices of energy has soared hurting consumers, entire industrial bases (Germany is a good example) and whole economies. There are many reasons including the boomerang-effects of sanctions, but the main reason is that American supplied gas will be much more expensive as will Gulf supplies - and they will exploit it as they unwittingly lock themselves into long-term contracts. The same is true of oil.

And now history is going to repeat itself but not so fast.

Westinghouse Electric Company went bankrupt only a short number of years ago. It was owned by Toshiba, and Westinghouse helped send them bankrupt too (Toshiba was in the news recently for the results of this debacle).

There are at least three factors to consider:

1 - options for nuclear fuel replacement are far more limited than other fossil fuels.

2 - the US alternative will be more expensive.

3 - don't expect any mates rates from Uncle Sam.

The bottom line is that it will be much more expensive and that is a competitive advantage other countries will not give up whether they be vendors or consumers.

The elephant in the room is the US long-term openly stated goal of cutting off the EU from Russian energy supplies and locking them into US supplies. From the US geopolitical perspective this is killing two birds with one stone: it allegedly hurts Russia and has the bonus knock-on effect of undermining EU sovereignty and effectively making them a supplicant to US foreign/economic policy.

According to trade statistics from the Japanese Finance Ministry, Japan's imports of fishery products from Russia in 2022 reached 155.2 billion yen ($1.1 billion), the highest level since 1992, the year after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Crab, sea urchins, shellfish, herring roe and squid amongst other products are leading the way.

Crab catches in Hokkaido have been on a downward trend, down more than 20% in just a few years.

Squid catches in Hokkaido tumbled by roughly 90% from about 120,000 tonnes in 2011 to 7,500 in 2021.

And fishing licenses have been suspended in the Kuril Islands.

It's against this backdrop of sanctions that the struggling Hokkaido fisheries industry is on track to smash records this year again with Russian imports propping up an industry that has issues.

I doubt the tax changes will impact this particular sector much, because it's driven by domestic demand for seafood.

The alternative would be skyrocketing seafood prices; how would your local sushi or chain conveyor belt sushi shop fare? or the seafood izakaya or those crab restaurants with the big robotic crab with moving legs on its sign, let alone the wholesalers and distributors big and small.

Allow me to rephrase the last sentence: this is a reciprocal move to the spectacular own goal of sanctions and stripping Russia of favored-nation-trading-status.

Competitive advantage to Chinese companies operating in Russia.

This article doesn't mention it but Japanese companies have largely not pulled out of Russia.

In fish markets around Tokyo you can see boxes of snow crab and other goodies lying about clearly marked "produce of Russia" in very big font. Indeed, last year the volume of seafood imported was a record amount!

Lumber imports have soared.

And the elephant in the room is the Sakhalin 2 gas project, with a 10%+ stake.

This reciprocal move is a spectacular own goal.