[skanchan95]

Ukraine releases video showing one of their Bayraktar-TB2 drones reportedly striking two Russian Navy Raptor-class fast-attack craft near Snake Island in the Black Sea. Video apparently is from this morning.

Seems the 2nd one was trying to get away after watching the first one blow up. Hard to expect anyone onboard to survive that kind of explosion on such small patrol boats.

With no air cover and no anti-air capability, these boats were sitting ducks in the water. Complacency? Incompetence? Or brilliant Ukrainian tactics? You can judge for yourself.

https://youtu.be/yx7x8Ly7OkQ

[V.Narayan]

Tanker carrying oil for India from Russia refused entry by Sweden, Rotterdam, Amsterdam

https://www.fleetmon.com/maritime-ne...ry-sweden-rot/

According to Amsterdam dockers unions, M.V. SUNNY LIGER won’t dock at Amsterdam, because all the companies which serve arriving ships refuse to provide services to tanker, starting with tugs. As of 1600 UTC Apr 30, tanker remained in the same position, anchored in the North sea.

Tanker SUNNY LIGER with cargo of oil loaded at Primorsk Russia, was rejected by Sweden, not by Swedish authorities though, but by Gothenburg dockers, who refused to handle the ship. Strictly speaking, tanker according to sanctions imposed on Russia, falls under “exceptions” section of sanctions, but nevertheless. Tanker sailed to Netherlands, but again, Rotterdam dockers union refused to work with Russian cargo, and M.V. SUNNY LIGER had to move to Amsterdam outer anchorage in North sea, arriving there late Apr 29. We do not know why the tanker needs to dock - injured crew? emergency repairs? take on supplies? refuel?

Servicing ships of neutral countries carrying cargo to and from Russia is permitted under the so called sanctions impose by the West. I don't believe these countries and the dockyards are refusing to service ships carrying Russian exports to their own shores for their own use. So much so for the rules-based horse manure the Western politicians and media harp on. Rules as it suits them when it suits them. I wonder if the MEA of India will take this up.

Western duplicity and intellectual dishonesty is something Govt's of the South have been very conscious of since at least the Vietnam War in the 1960s. In circa 1981 I was reading articles in a London published magazine appropriately titled 'South' about how the Western media controls the narrative. To be honest in that age before the internet and google search I did not quite grasp the implications. Today we have come at least half a circle from there when thanks to social media the sheer hypocrisy and lies of the Western media are there for all to see and for all to comment on.

[thanixravindran]

^@ V.Narayan - Tomorrow's headlines in the main stream media in West will be (I believe this will be covered given Indian PM's visit to Europe since the outset of conflict, probably this may even be a subtle message during his visit)

Moved the plight by hapless Ukrainians who are standing up to the tyranny of the Medieval evil incarnate Putin and his cronies, Dutch and Swedish dockers 'spontaneously' decided to support their brethren by boycotting the Russian 'embargoed' cargo to India spreading the message of European solidarity to not only the Russians but other nations too who chose to deal with the evil regime despite sanctions. This move is widely expected to be taken notice in New Delhi and gives them a chance to provide un-wavered support to the sanctions.

Indian media will copy paste the article with a changed headline - Russian oil tanker to India stranded in North Sea as if it does not know the route without analyzing the way you did. With the recent assertive tone and openness of MEA, I am hoping this will be responded to strongly.

"Indian narrative has to be told by us and cannot be from anywhere else. We must be in control of our story. We should - tell it first, tell it well and repeatedly, in different ways and different times" - Vikram Sood, The Ultimate Goal.

[dragracer567]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

No matter how much someone loves Putin he is laying the foundation for very long winter for the ordinary Russian.

Thank you sir, for making this point. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I’ve known a good number of Russian folks from ERAMUS programs (which a fellow member snided as ‘global trotting’ exceptions, but please bear with me on this). What the Ukrainian civilians are going through is very much a war crime but what we don’t hear about either from the western media or the Russian media is the condition of the Russian people. Looking at the Iranian example (again, I’ve known a good number of Iranian students + met quite a few in Dubai), what will happen is a slow but steady degradation of the standard of living of the Russian people because the effects of sanctions are never overnight, with the Russians essentially being cut off from the rest of the world. One of my Russian acquaintance posted on Facebook that he feels that the Pro-Russia media functions almost akin to Fox News in that they pretty much create an alternative reality by pandering to inherent tribalistic fears!

The west, essentially with their brutal sanctions have setup Russia to slowly descend into a humanitarian crisis - a crisis which the west can clean their hands off but the Russian people didn’t ask for this war and now they will suffer for it, not Putin or those oligarchs!

PS We’ve seen posts in this thread taking about the far right in Ukraine to provide a justification for this war. If far right fringe groups are the problem and invading countries is the solution, then the US, UK, France, Germany and even India would deserve to be invaded! Fringe groups are not an indication of a society/country till they get mainstream.

[skanchan95]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Tanker carrying oil for India from Russia refused entry by Sweden, Rotterdam, Amsterdam

A few days ago there always a report in the newspaper that Indian Oil Companies were struggling/unable to find vessels to transport crude oil from Russia to India.

May be the treatment meted out to this Oil Tanker is one of the reasons why shipping lines are reluctant to transport crude oil from Russia.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by skanchan95

A few days ago there always a report in the newspaper that Indian Oil Companies were struggling/unable to find vessels to transport crude oil from Russia to India.

May be the treatment meted out to this Oil Tanker is one of the reasons why shipping lines are reluctant to transport crude oil from Russia.

Clearly USA, & Europe are not having trouble chartering oil tankers!!! Maybe we should ask the Chinese. Our Ministry of Shipping over successive Govt's since the 1980s run down Shipping Corporation as well as Indian private shipping companies with unenlightened policies. At a time like this they realize the power of a strong national merchant marine.

[Old_Salt]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Tanker carrying oil for India from Russia refused entry by Sweden, Rotterdam, Amsterdam

https://www.fleetmon.com/maritime-ne...ry-sweden-rot/

According to Amsterdam dockers unions, M.V. SUNNY LIGER won’t dock at Amsterdam, because all the companies which serve arriving ships refuse to provide services to tanker, starting with tugs. As of 1600 UTC Apr 30, tanker remained in the same position, anchored in the North sea.

Tanker SUNNY LIGER with cargo of oil loaded at Primorsk Russia, was rejected by Sweden, not by Swedish authorities though, but by Gothenburg dockers, who refused to handle the ship. Strictly speaking, tanker according to sanctions imposed on Russia, falls under “exceptions” section of sanctions, but nevertheless. Tanker sailed to Netherlands, but again, Rotterdam dockers union refused to work with Russian cargo, and M.V. SUNNY LIGER had to move to Amsterdam outer anchorage in North sea, arriving there late Apr 29. We do not know why the tanker needs to dock - injured crew? emergency repairs? take on supplies? refuel?

Servicing ships of neutral countries carrying cargo to and from Russia is permitted under the so called sanctions impose by the West. I don't believe these countries and the dockyards are refusing to service ships carrying Russian exports to their own shores for their own use. So much so for the rules-based horse manure the Western politicians and media harp on. Rules as it suits them when it suits them. I wonder if the MEA of India will take this up.

Western duplicity and intellectual dishonesty is something Govt's of the South have been very conscious of since at least the Vietnam War in the 1960s. In circa 1981 I was reading articles in a London published magazine appropriately titled 'South' about how the Western media controls the narrative. To be honest in that age before the internet and google search I did not quite grasp the implications. Today we have come at least half a circle from there when thanks to social media the sheer hypocrisy and lies of the Western media are there for all to see and for all to comment on.

Looked up some details regarding the captioned vessel, on Marine traffic and vessel finder.

What I can add up is that the cargo was loaded in Russia for Gothenburg. After Swedish longshoremen refused to work, seems like the owners tried to offload the cargo at Amsterdam.

It doesn't look like the cargo was bound for India.

The only connection to India I could locate was that the ship is managed in India. It's flagged at Marshall Islands.

She is not affected by the EU ban however the challenges in the Netherlands are related exclusively to public concern that Russian petroleum sales are funding the invasion of Ukraine.

If the cargo was bound for India, there would be no reason for the vessel to try to stopover at 2 different ports.

Bunker, stores, spares would normally not require such diversion except in exceptional cases causing some breakdown.
Any medical issues of that sort can be easily dealt with a helicopter evacuation.

[goacom]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Tanker carrying oil for India from Russia refused entry by Sweden, Rotterdam, Amsterdam

https://www.fleetmon.com/maritime-ne...ry-sweden-rot/

Western duplicity and intellectual dishonesty is something Govt's of the South have been very conscious of since at least the Vietnam War in the 1960s. In circa 1981 I was reading articles in a London published magazine appropriately titled 'South' about how the Western media controls the narrative. To be honest in that age before the internet and google search I did not quite grasp the implications. Today we have come at least half a circle from there when thanks to social media the sheer hypocrisy and lies of the Western media are there for all to see and for all to comment on.

As pointed by old_salt, this has nothing to do with India. This oil was meant to be consumed by Europe. There is no oil embargo on Russian oil as yet. However it seems that there are workers in Europe who are refusing to handle Russian oil either due to moral considerations or due to the bad PR that may result from this.

India could import this oil with no fear of sanctions and could get a good discount on it assuming the Russian's cant sell it to anyone else for a lower discount. The sanctions and oil embargos are working exactly as desired - to increase losses for Russia, while allowing oil importing countries to get a discount. China for example, has not significantly ramped up Russian oil imports. The thinking is that they are waiting for Russian oil storage to reach capacity and will then drive a hard bargain to get maximum discounts.

Russian flagged tankers are banned in much of the west, but of course if and when the oil embargo does kick in, it will mean that no Russian oil will be allowed to enter Europe regardless of the flag of the tanker.

It is easy to blame the west for every issue. I hear the US was responsible for having Imran Khan overthrown in Pakistan recently.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by Old_Salt

Looked up some details regarding the captioned vessel, on Marine traffic and vessel finder.

What I can add up is that the cargo was loaded in Russia for Gothenburg. After Swedish longshoremen refused to work, seems like the owners tried to offload the cargo at Amsterdam.

It doesn't look like the cargo was bound for India.

The only connection to India I could locate was that the ship is managed in India. It's flagged at Marshall Islands.

Thank you for this lucid and complete explanation. Not being a sailor it was confusing for me to figure out the Indian angle. This is the wonderful attribute of Team BHP - there will almost always be someone with expert knowledge on the subject to clarify, explain, clear doubts and so so. And willing to share his/her knowledge in a civil manner unlike vast parts of social media.

Originally Posted by goacom

It is easy to blame the west for every issue. I hear the US was responsible for having Imran Khan overthrown in Pakistan recently.

I'm not in that corner, as quite a few of my posts will testify, but you are welcome to assume whatever sails your boat.

[goacom]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

I'm not in that corner, as quite a few of my posts will testify, but you are welcome to assume whatever sails your boat.

@V.Narayan, I was not referring to you. Although I disagree with many of your comments, you are one of the sane and balanced voices here!
Regards.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by goacom

@V.Narayan, I was not referring to you. Although I disagree with many of your comments, you are one of the sane and balanced voices here!
Regards.

Gotta tell me wifey that.

[Poitive]

In the words of 9 time Oscar winner and someone who has extensively worked on projects in Ukraine and has an interview series spanning 2 years on Putin:





Link: https://twitter.com/TheOliverStone/s...03717453852672

~~~~~~
In case you're keen to know more about Oliver Stone, some basic info:

Two years later in 2016, Stone was executive producer for Ukrainian-born director Igor Lopatonok's film Ukraine on Fire, a documentary written by Vanessa Dean. In the film, Lopatonok showed the historic background of divisions in the region; Stone interviewed ousted president Yanukovych and Russian president Vladimir Putin about events such as the 2004 Orange Revolution and the removal of Yanukovych in the 2014 Maidan Revolution. Narratives in the film such as by the late investigative journalist Robert Parry described the rise of US-funded NGOs active in the area and suggested that the Maidan Revolution was a US-backed coup d'état.[128]

Stone's series of interviews with Russian president Putin over the span of two years was released as The Putin Interviews, a four-night television event on Showtime on June 12, 2017.[129] On June 13, Stone and Professor Stephen F. Cohen joined John Batchelor in New York to record an hour of commentary on The Putin Interviews.

William Oliver Stone (born September 15, 1946) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter.[1][2][3] Stone won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay as writer of Midnight Express (1978), and wrote the gangster film remake Scarface (1983). Stone achieved prominence as writer and director of the war drama Platoon (1986), which won Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture. Platoon was the first in a trilogy of films based on the Vietnam War, in which Stone served as an infantry soldier. He continued the series with Born on the Fourth of July (1989)—for which Stone won his second Best Director Oscar—and Heaven & Earth (1993). Stone's other works include the Salvadoran Civil War-based drama Salvador (1986); the financial drama Wall Street (1987) and its sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010); the Jim Morrison biographical film The Doors (1991); the satirical black comedy crime film Natural Born Killers (1994); a trilogy of films based on the American Presidency: JFK (1991), Nixon (1995), and W. (2008); and Snowden (2016).

Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Stone

PS: Whatever other reservations I might have about the US and the West, I do appreciate that he is able to make such statements, which might not be possible in, say, Russia or China; even in Ukraine, we have the Gonzalo Lira incident.

[Sran]

Jorge Mario Bergoglio a.k.a Pope Francis of Roman Catholic church has said NATO may have caused Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera Francis says that Perhaps the "barking of NATO at Russia's door" facilitated the attack.

He also said that he is not going to Kiev for now. Russia and Ukraine both are orthodox Christians. Hungary, Belarus and Armenia are all Orthodox Christians and rest of Europe except Poland are Catholic Christians which Francis heads.

https://www.corriere.it/cronache/22_...144a5eff.shtml

Excerpts:

Pope Francis' concern is that Putin, for the moment, will not stop . He also tries to think about the roots of this behavior, about the reasons that push him to such a brutal war. Perhaps the "barking of NATO at Russia's door" prompted the head of the Kremlin to react badly and unleash the conflict. "An anger that I don't know if it was provoked - he wonders - but perhaps eased, yes" .

What is absurd about Indian media is that they have not written any word about Pope's statement which is an embarrassment for NATO. Instead they ran with the storyline that Pope wants to meet Putin in Moscow and is still waiting for the word.

[RadixLecti]

Originally Posted by Sran

Hungary, Belarus and Armenia are all Orthodox Christians and rest of Europe except Poland are Catholic Christians which Francis heads.

I realise we (Catholics in particular and Christians in general) are a tiny minority in India but how did you manage to get so much wrong in one sentence?

Large parts of Northern Europe are Protestant (to the extent that they profess any faith at all). Protestant is a catch-all term that includes Lutherans, Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists etc.

Orthodox is also a catch-all term for the various Eastern Orthodox churches, which tend to be divided into national churches, therefore there is Greek Orthodox, Bulgarian Orthodox, Romanian Orthodox, Russian Orthodox and so on and so forth.

The Armenian church is also Orthodox, but they fall under Oriental Orthodoxy, which is similar in some ways but distinct from the Orthodoxy of Greece and the Slavic nations.

As for Catholicism, in Europe it is mostly centred around the Mediterranean, with minorities in Northern Europe (Ireland being an exception, almost wholly Catholic). There are also several Eastern European countries which are majority Catholic. Croatia is one, Slovakia is another.
The largest Christian denomination in Hungary by far is the Roman Catholic church.
Finally, Poland is one of the most staunchly Roman Catholic countries in existence; they would not thank you for excluding them from the fold.

[Poitive]

Things are surely more complex than Orthodox and Roman Catholic. There is a whole 'war' between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox parts. Sharing a bit I came across.

Source: The Role of Religion in Russia’s War on Ukraine

Then, in the aftermath of the Euromaidan Revolution in Kyiv in 2014, the same conversation resurfaced. Patriarch Filaret of Kyiv petitioned the Russian Orthodox Church to grant Ukraine autocephaly — but was denied. In an act of defiance, he chose to found an independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine without Moscow’s consent and began to petition parishes around the country to change their allegiance. Moscow responded by excommunicating Filaret and appointing their own Patriarch of Ukraine based in the eastern city of Kharkiv.

By 2018, then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had realized the political significance of this rift between the churches. He orchestrated a petition to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, thereby reigniting old the centuries-old struggles between Moscow and Constantinople for supreme authority over world Orthodoxy. Bartholomew approved the request for autocephaly in Ukraine, giving his blessing to the establishment of an independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine. As a result, the Russian Orthodox Church broke communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate.

Another article: Explained: How is the Russia-Ukraine war linked to religion?

Also:

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church is the largest Eastern Catholic Church in the world. Currently it has approximately 4.1 million members.[8] Within Ukraine itself, the UGCC is the second largest religious organization in terms of number of communities within the Catholic Church. In terms of number of members, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church ranks third in allegiance among the population of Ukraine after the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. Currently, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church predominates in three western oblasts of Ukraine, including the majority of the population of Lviv, but constitutes a small minority elsewhere in the country.

Link: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukra...atholic_Church

I presume the concentration on the western part is due to it's proximity to Poland. IIRC a part of Poland was taken over by the Soviets in WW2, and that is the western part of Ukraine (Lviv etc)
.