A New Mode of Cancer Treatment

There have been some incidents on the Polish border recently that put the whole thing on a knife edge.

Meh. Łukaszenko and Putin were waving their nuclear dicks around over here for decades at this point. The only reason they do it is to scare away the more naive westerners. Nobody here takes it seriously.

> Nobody here takes it seriously.

A downfalling desperate Putin is likely to cause serious damage with nuclear weapons. I think should be very cautios, but am not suggesting we should giving in to his his nuclear erection. The doomsday clock is 90 seconds to midnight for a reason.

The present threat is no nuclear in nature.

Planes from Belarus flew into Polish airspace, and Lukashenko has threatened that Wagner troops are eager to enter Poland.

Wagner vs GROM seems seriously a bad idea for Wagner.

I know. It's not a threat, just posturing. Russia entering any new war right now will just lose both. And Belarus is trying very hard not to forced to actually fight.

Putin couldn't even force his army to stop 500 people going on Moscow. Had to negotiate, losing face in his own empire. But he will surely have enough influence to force the same army to commit nuclear suicide on his dying whim :)

It's just a threat to make west slightly less likely to help Ukraine for real. If people stopped falling for it 10 years earlier we wouldn't have been in this predicament, millions of people and billions of USD would be saved. All that was needed was to accept Ukraine into NATO or do serious response to 2008 and 2014 russian invasions.

No, that's just noise generated by the Russians and Belarus and then picked up by the press to make it sound dramatic. This is par for the course for Russian disinfo.

A conventional conflict with NATO seems like complete suicide. Even if it happened, I'd have no concern as long as it stays conventional. It would be like being attacked by an old Chihuahua.

Ok, I'll tell my family that they should lay off the drugs and are just seeing things.

What, specifically, is your family seeing?

So far there are some troops near the Polish border, and a possible helicopter incursion. There's not a lot that civilions could see unless they lived right on the border.

Business as usual. Lukashenko is bringing immigrants to the border with Poland and giving them tools to illegally cross the border, even though these poor people could do it legally a few dozens of kilometers away using a normal border crossing and asking for asylum etc. Poland accepted millions of refugees from Ukraine and a few hundred thousand from Asia and Africa.

So Putin's plan is just to create problems and confusion using Lukashenko as a proxy. These immigrants have been there for more than a year and he is still bringing new ones.

I agree and yet im feeling very uneasy about a vindictive cornered bully like Putin

> possible helicopter incursion

It's not a possible. And yes there are people living 'right on the border'.

So the Belarus incursion that Belarus denies and the Polish publicly announced response are all Russian disinfo?

If I lived on the border, I'd be upset, too. However, this isn't very far from standard Russian way of doing things. They regularly invade air space of various NATO countries, maybe just to test their fighters, maybe to introduce some tension, who knows. The routine is that our fighters escort the intruders back to where they came from. In this case, since the military training was communicated well in advance and the army was expected their aircraft near the border, nobody even bothered. Funnily enough, the last news from Belarus indicate that it might be in fact an accident, not planned action.

The whole story is quite interesting. After Lukashenko falsified the elections (again) and Belorussians went on the streets (for the first time with such an intensity), in the end Lukashenko decided to fight for his life and visited Putin to get his support. After that, the protests were brutally ended, people dead or in prisons, and Lukashenko came from Moscow with full Putin support. But also with two strings attached: the first was organized transport of people from Africa etc. to Minsk and then to the forests near the borders with Poland and Lithuania. The other one was letting Putin use his land for attacks on Ukraine (which backfired in various ways; one of them was the rise of Belorussian resistance movement among railway workers who regularly sabotaged Russian railway transport near the border in Ukraine).

So the interesting question here that many people ask is, what game is Lukashenko playing here? I saw many comments that he just pretends he is stupid but in fact he is quite intelligent and he's doing what he can to keep his country as far away from war as possible. At the same time, he needs some tension and external enemy to help him keep the power (at least among the ~20% of Belorussians who actually believe the official propaganda and support him).

I very much hope I will live long enough to see the day when Belorussians finally get their freedom in a peaceful way and can enjoy living in peace, doing business with other countries and just be happy. I know many of them, they are very nice people, it's such a pity they need to go through this shit.

Wars can get started by stupid shit like this. I'm definitely not laughing. All it needs is one incident like what happened over Turkey. That one blew over but with the present climate I'm not so sure it will.

> I very much hope I will live long enough to see the day when Belorussians finally get their freedom in a peaceful way

Seconded. I had such high hopes that they could push it through the last time around and what really irks me is that there are enough Belorussians still that keep this jackass in power, and that they will prioritize their own financial well being over their fellow citizens' lives. I was in Poland during the Solidarity uprising and I had such high hopes for the rest of the SovBloc but not everybody managed to take advantage of the momentum. Ironically, distance from German capital seems to have been a prime factor in the outcome.