I’ve noticed that in both Belgium and The Netherlands there has been an increase in war talk lately, saying how we need more military personnel and that we need to be wary of Russia. I’ve seen some British articles about it too.

Now, I hope it is purely coincidental otherwise I’d have to get worried about EU+UK being complete idiots and preparing for war.

  • Valbrandur
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    5 months ago

    Spain. No drums here, probably because they know that as always no one is willing to die for this mess of a country lmao.

    • redtea
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      5 months ago

      Would Spain even trust arming and training all the separatist regions?

      • Valbrandur
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        5 months ago

        Regional separatism is quite strong, to the point of having leaked into the culture itself of those regions, but those movements are non-violent, to the point in which organized acts of violence have been virtually nonexistant since almost a decade and a half ago in the Basque Country and for even longer in Catalonia. No, the truth is that very few people would not get angry at the prospect of being forced into conscription (a concept that, if it wasn’t awful enough by itself, is also tightly associated with the Francoist regime), and being on the other side of the continent no one really believes that Russia is any threat to us in particular. Moreover, the Spanish government has been pulling some moves that are very unpopular with the right-wing sector of the country by attempting to reach a compromise with the Catalan separatist movement and granting amnesty to the political prisoners of the Referendum of the 1st of October, so threatening the population with war mobilization is pretty much the worst thing they could do right now.

        • redtea
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          5 months ago

          Gracias por la sabía de los dentros.

          (Eso no aparece correcto. ¿Cómo se dice <insider knowledge>?)

          • Valbrandur
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            5 months ago

            It would be “Gracias por el conocimiento interno”, although that is not much of an expression in Spanish.

            • redtea
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              5 months ago

              Thanks for the translation and the caveat. Out of interest, is there a similar idiom?

    • jabrd [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      5 months ago

      Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t Spain making a killing off the switch to LNG since nordstream was killed? iirc y’all have like one of two LNG import ports in Europe so Spain’s actually one of the few EU countries to come out ahead on this war economically

      • Valbrandur
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        5 months ago

        What I can say is that we have been importing a lot of Russian LNG, and for what I see at some point we were their 2nd largest clients worldwide only behind China. I couldn’t find any information regarding how well has Spain’s economy fared with this, but in other sources I found that only 5% of what we are buying goes to other members of the EU, so there’s also that.