Yeah, and that didn't work out too well for us last time. We... we just don't like to talk about it.

Well, that depends on the polls you go by. Prior to Russian troops entering Crimea, polls had showed a little over 50% of the population in favor of Crimea becoming independent, with about 41% in favor of Crimea becoming part of Russia. Then with Russian troops occupying the country and pro-Russian mobs running around unchecked the referendum suddenly comes out with 97% in favor of joining Russia. This in a region where 12% of the population are ethnic Tatars (who suffered forcible deportation under Russia's previous rule of the region, with over 100,000 dying as a result), and 25% of the population are ethnic Ukrainians. And on top of that you're unlikely to get 97% of the population to agree even if the question is "cake or death?"; generally 60-70% agreement in an election is a landslide, while over 70% is a farce. The 97% result was pretty much Russia just saying to the rest of the world "Yeah, we totally rigged the vote. What are you gonna do about it?"

It's highly unlikely that it's going to erupt into any major kind of shooting war. However, there may be some significantly economic fallout from all of it (just a few days ago Russia was kicked out of the G8, and we're likely to see more economic retaliation to Russia's actions as things progress). The way it would most likely end up affecting you is if Europe stops buying Russian gas and oil, which would cripple Russia's economy, but which would also drive up the overall price of oil as Europe looks to buy from other sources.

Even more than Poland being part of the EU (which is mostly focused on economics), Poland is a member of NATO. Thus any military action against Poland would trigger a full response from all other NATO members (unless they're willing to completely scrap NATO to leave Poland hanging, which is highly unlikely to happen).

Oopsie? ;)

I have noooo idea what you're talking about. ;)

For a moment there i thought i didn't take my meds. But since the walls are still plushy, everything must be fine. Carry on.;)

The main problem with being a militaristic scumbag who doesn't work in the White House is that at some point, you got to put your money where your mouth is and given that nobody tried to invade the US in quite a while, that tends to involve getting shot at on foreign soil (or family members doing it for you)... an activity that is way more fun on a computer screen then in RL :P.

Yeah, but I have a feeling the Brits wouldn't come and fight for us if it happened again. They did it in the past and they don't have much to show for it now do they :P?

They do look awesome :).

Yeah, "belligerent" major world powers limit their military objectives to their immediate sphere of influence nowadays (mostly, historical territorial claims).

The age of military conquest is over and the age of economical conquest is upon us.

Don't fear the Rurrian military, fear their Vodka exports!

I don't think they can annex Poland. They can only bully small countries or countries with russian populations which wouldn't fight against the "motherland". If Poles would have some backbone (and I think they have) they could stand on their own against Russia, not to mention that NATO will help them.


The problem is Europe CAN'T stop buying Russian gas because the only pipes are directed to Russia. There is a project (Trans Adriatic Pipeline) to transport natural gas from Azerbaijan through Turkey, Greece, Adriatic Sea to Italy and to Western Europe. This will reduce EU dependence on Russia but will only be ready in 2017-2018.

There was another project (Nabucoo) to transport natural gas also from Azerbaijan through Turkey but then through Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Austria but his project floped.

The good news is that OMV (Austria) and ExxonMobil (US) discovered a huge gas field in the Black Sea (in the Romanian waters) but the first production will not be ready until 2018-2020.

That may be true but EU could finnally get it's act together and start investing heavily on energy and oil saving technologies, alternate heat and energy producing technologies and put out laws to ease their adoption. While they won't eliminate our reliance on gas and oil imports they can significantly reduce it. Many such technologies and techniques already exist today and not all of them even require signifficant investment to adopt. Heck, many of them would pay back the investment required in few years. People and companies simply lack the knowledge about them.

Yeah I suppose you're right. The thing is that when the United States does we don't seem to notice because it's nothing new. When someone else does it like Russia well people like me start to worry and think of the worst case scenario. It's not right and it is a huge double standard, but I guess thats just how my brain works. I just hope that in maybe a year(give or take some months) this will just be remembered as a little incident or something I don't know.

Russians are cool. They are responsible for some really awesome modding work for Fallout like the TeamX patch. This whole thing is blown out of proportion, most of Crimea obviously wanted to be part of Russia anyway.

Just to cool everybody down, no Polish guys I know in Poland received call-up papers :)
But I'm starting to feel happy that I'm 'unable to serve in the military in time of peace' :)
Fun fact:
The one we currently have ('opened' crown) is a vassal's crown.
King's crown is 'closed', like this one

The idea of being "called up" and having to go into military service sounds pretty horrible, I'm sure if I had to go from lounging around and playing games and never exercising or being social, and then get thrown into some barracks with military discipline, I'd probably have a panic attack/mental breakdown right then and there.

Probably end up like that guy in Full Metal Jacket :(

In 1295? :)
(actually the crown was already 'opened' in times of Otton III and his early dreams of EU :))