Ha ha.

Harry’s Place has risen from the dead, you doubting Thomases.

Wrong. China had a pop at Taiwan, oooh, must have been 4-5 years ago now, maybe slightly longer…

Who’d win?

90s term it may sound like but it is actually used in defence terminology!

Yeah I know, it still makes me cringe though…

why is everybody so surprised? the russian have never given a feck what anyone in the rest of the world thought of them. they understand power politics and don’t even make a pretence of slapping a nod towards the distant country of ethics on top of it. not very pleasant but at least you know where you stand.

Extremely well said and couldn’t have put it better, completely agree.

Russia is usually alluded to as a bear. In all the Baltic states there are large populations of ethnic Russians and they are a huge threat to the stability of countries such as Estonia.

Yes Russia is full of hard men and autocracy does seem to be a style of government that many Russians desire. Unfortunately they have huge natural resources that the rest of the world desire. Money is pouring in and you can bet that much of it is not being used for benign purposes. Putin has made it clear that Russia is still a world power so we should all be careful.

Chelsea included.

When Putin showed up in public a few years back wearing a traditional Russian Kaftan, you just knew something was amiss.

I fully support the bun fight, which seems to be an eastern European tradition – there is a tea room in Prague, where, if you pay your 20 euro, you can throw yesterday’s stale donuts at all the customers!

Yeah better than bullets and bombs, maybe this could be the way of the future. Anti democratic to disable web sites etc but even then!!! The other alternative should be an organised bun fight.

Moscow Bell? Moscow balls more like

Siberia? Sibollocks more like

Been to Russia. Bunch of miserable wooly coated shysters

I agree. Russians behave more like South Asians, or them lot from ‘back home’, with their pronounced sense of “scarcity mentality”.

Quite franky we often make the same mistake with the Americans.

TFI

These things are normally launched from bot nets that are run by criminal gangs.

Now if you know any Russians they are highly nationalistic, are quite aggressive and proud. I’ve been to Estonia and this issue really splits the tiny country and as always both sides have a point, although my sympathies lie with the Estonians rather than the Russians.

Basically all that I’ll driving at is the removal of the statue is highly symbolic and upsets ALL Russians including the criminal gangs that organize cyber attacks on gambling websites.

It works like this, you get an email with a bank account number and you don’t pay x amount by a certain time they take your site down during a major sporting event like the grand national, losing you a fortune in trade. The only really defense for these companies is to have enough servers and enough bandwidth to sustain their service throughout the attack.

So it is quite likely that the owners of these bot nets have decided to attack Estonia purely for their own reasons.

Either way “Beware the Russians” damn right!

TFI

the mistake people make is because they’re white, people think they’re european – even europeans make this mistake and then get all huffy and hurt when they don’t act like them.

this is the country that invented the knout.

b’shalom

bananabrain