Greed isn't always the reason.

Iran, NK, Russia, and lots of other heavily sanctioned countries just create front companies overseas to buy the goods they need.

I knew a guy worked for a company waaaay back in the day that sold a couple of supercomputers to a Western European company that did meteorological simulation.

A few months later, the feds were crawling all over them because those computers had inexplicably ended up in totally different country and were being used for nuclear weapons research.

I guess, maybe in the excitement to make a big sale, someone didn't do their due diligence as well as they should have, but this front company wasn't exactly a couple of post office boxes and an empty building somewhere, either.

It had all the relevant legal paperwork and finances to say they were legit, everything checked out, so why not sell to them?

high-five, fellow Firefox buddy!

Yeah, for other people reading this message who haven't found it already, if reader view is available for the page you're on, then you can enable it by clicking the the thing that looks like a book in the right hand side of the URL bar.

If you're on iOS, tap the symbol that looks like two letter As in the URL bar for Safari and pick "show reader" from the menu.

On Android, you need to enable "simplified view" in the accessibility settings for your phone. After that, it's available through Chrome when you load a page.

Desktop browsers have reader modes too. Or I assume they all do. Edge and Firefox definitely both do, and they're the only browsers I use.

It's really not.

NATO, and the US in particular, will do everything they can to support Ukraine from afar and see Russia weakened as a result, but if it comes down to choosing between WW3 or abandoning Ukraine to Russia, nobody's going to pick WW3, which is exactly why Putin won't STFU with all the nuke threats.

He has only two ways out of this clusterfuck:

• keep fighting a war of attrition and praying his economy holds out while he tries to manipulate public opinion through his troll farms and to interfere in overseas elections to get pro-Russian parties into power so that support Ukraine dwindles. ^*

• make the Western world believe that you're willing to start WW3 and kill the entire planet, whilst hiding in a bunker and making sure nobody close to you thinks you're that crazy so that they don't assassinate you.

^* if you're American, please don't vote Trump in '24

While all the things you say about Putin are true - he's an absolute piece of shit - no politician or leader in the history of war has ever stood up and said "yeah, I made a bad mistake here and things aren't going well"