Is there any sort of a website or casino betting parlor where you can wager on the time/day that Putin invades Ukraine?

Place your bet.
Just for shits and giggles.
And see how correct you might be.

SHAME ON YOU!!! I think there’s an unwritten rule in bookmaking that you don’t offer odds relating to human death. I’ve heard lots of people have requested odds on Queen Elizabeth dying before a certain date but have been told they can’t as it’s unethical. I really can’t help but agree as it is a bit morbid!!!

(The question sounds very callous to me too.)

The UK has legally operating bookies who will take bets and set odds on damned near anything. And the online sites do a whopping business.

Putin is going to invade (or not) on his own volition – nothing I can say or do will make one iota of difference.

@LadyMarissa I am not familiar with unwritten rules.

I’ll take that bet. This will blow over and there won’t be an invasion and there certainly won’t be any military action by the West.

My bet is within the next 2 weeks. Putin just signed a decree recognising the “independence” of separatist enclaves Luhansk and Donezk in East Ukraine. Meaning if they “ask for help”, Russia can move in with a pretense of justification.

But Europe already hit back: sanctions.

It is indeed seeming more likely. I’ve read a lot of coverage and commentary, and I found some especially striking comments in David Brooks’s Feb. 17th column in the New York Times. A quote:

The 21st century has become a dark century because the seedbeds of democracy have been neglected and normal historical authoritarianism is on the march. Putin and Xi seem confident that the winds of history are at their back. Writing in The Times a few weeks ago, Hill said that Putin believes the United States is in the same predicament Russia was in during the 1990s — “weakened at home and in retreat abroad.”

Putin, Xi and the other global conservatives make comprehensive critiques of liberalism and the failings of liberal society. Unlike past authoritarians they have the massive power of modern surveillance technology to control their citizens. Russian troops are on the border of Ukraine because Putin needs to create the kind of disordered world that people like him thrive in. “The problem Russia has faced since the end of the Cold War is that the greatness Putin and many Russians seek cannot be achieved in a world that is secure and stable,” Kagan writes in “The Jungle Grows Back.” “To achieve greatness on the world stage, Russia must bring the world back to a past when neither Russians nor anyone else enjoyed security. [Boldface added.]

The idea of betting money on the start of World War III seems callous to me, even though it can be understood as a way of diminishing the horror of it. Soon enough, we may all be paying for it.

I believe loli is most likeky correct. The ethnic Russian separatists need only poke and agitate civil unrest. Government intervention to suppress disorder will then be seized upon by Putin as “genocide” and the “liberation” of the Eastern half of the country will commence.

Did I say 2 weeks?
It was 2 hours.