Happy new year Rods. Where you been hiding?
OOF and economics have had to take a bit of a backseat due to my wife being ill with ulcerative colitis, which we have found is mainly due to lactic acid, so not allowed any dairy products including no milk chocolate! She is on a special gluten and dairy free diet, fortunately the medicine has brought it under control, so bleeding and diarrhoea have stopped, but it is something that has to be kept under control.
Work commitments mean I do not have much spare time at the moment and what I do tends to be spent on the situation in Ukraine and Russia / Kremlin watching to understand, second guess, what is going on. 2015 is going to be 'interesting' where everything is currently on a knife edge and anything can happen over the next 6 months; from a settlement to Russia starting a much more intensive general war in Ukraine in the spring. The Russian mercenary, troop and armaments build up still is increasing everyday, especially tanks, heavy self-propelled artillery and comms. jamming equipment. There is also a Donbas air force in Russia which they want to base at Donetsk airport, but dogged Ukrainian resistance, where they hold it, means ever rising heaving casualties for Russia here. The Russian economic situation is putting pressure on Russia for a settlement, but Putin by nature is an aggressive bully. At the moment Russian GRU and other recruits are increasing the amount of terrorist actions they are carrying out in the bigger Ukrainian cities and out of town sabotage of the railways. Russia has paid a high price so far with 5,000+ troops and mercenaries killed. Like the 1930's Finnish Winter War where we now know there were 129,000 deaths, this was made a state secret by Stalin at the time, so the same applies with Russian casualties in Ukraine. Two Russian people running social media sites to collect and collate the stories of known Russian dead and missing have found this to their cost where they are subject to major harassment from the authorities, including being classified as foreign agents! Ukrainian army deaths are about 1200 with about 300 missing, which are likely to be classified as dead in the future. About 5,000 innocent civilians have been killed so far mainly by the Russian mercenaries. In the afternoon and evening their artillery and mortar accuracy tends to kill civilians or their own due to drunken arguments, where they 9 parts to the wind on vodka!
There are currently power shortages in Ukraine due to lack of foresight and coal and this means there are rolling power cuts across the county (except Kyiv) between 1 and 4 times a day for about 2 hours at a time.
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Topic: Happy New year (Read 955 times)