Why past tense? Still walking...
Do you think those stereotypes are really helpful in understanding geopolitics? Traditionally what russia has always done(after it conquered its east), was being invaded, loosing lots of land, let the invader bleed out in the winter and then push back and win new territories.
Then russia as a monarchy was quite different to the sowjet union, the result of a marxist revolution with marxist agenda. And russia after the sowjet union was first weak and now they try to find strength in the traditional empire values again, religion and tsar. But it is not a given, that they will keep that, only if it works out for them. I hope it doesn't.
So defense spending as prevention of war isn't really a thing either. Nor is winning them (forget Afghanistan?)
It seems quite clear that the German elite class had been wholly corrupted by Russia who offered them enrichment at the cost of Ukrainians and ultimately long term German security.
It makes a lot more sense when you look at how America's own elites sold out America to China.
All of this (charitably assuming good faith) was founded on the idea of inevitability. People thought peace was an inevitable result of trade, liberalization was an inevitable result of prosperity, and democratization an inevitable result of capitalism.
He was only against the war in Ukraine when it became obvious it was not going to be a three day one and done operation.
He did recant any notion of Ukrainians being Russian. He also asserted ukrainians Right to independent self-governing.
The writing is on the wall for a while now, the only problem is that people talking about it are promptly labeled as not worthy of being listened to
Exactly, did people forget Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014? Let's not be naive here.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-war-eu-aid-funding...
Also are we just ignoring Vladimir Kara-Murza in terms of opposition figures fighting for regime change?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/14/putin-ukr...
Russia is not gaining noteworthy traction. Avdiivka is a tiny pointless place aside from the fact that Russia is willing to impale itself at horrible odds to achieve any victory it can for optics.
"Both sides regard Avdiivka as key to Russia's aim of securing full control of the two eastern "Donbas" provinces - Donetsk and Luhansk. These are among the four Ukrainian regions Russia says it has annexed but does not have full control of. Avdiivka is seen as a gateway to Donetsk city, whose residential areas Russian officials say have been shelled by Ukrainian forces, sometimes from Avdiivka."
-- Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/why-does-russia-want-ca...
I don't understand your point about optics. Why does Russia care about optics in this case? Ukraine has to care about optics because they are completely dependent on NATO aid for their survival at this point.
If the U.S. were still supplying Ukraine they'd be in a much better place.
Funny, the world had the same thought in 1936.
- You don't get it. An alliance of china, russia, iran and north korea will be enabled to do whatever they want. Including invading or, more likely, hitting with missiles critical infrastructure in any Nato country with the exception of US and UK
As much as it is incomprehensible for America, there are societies that do not value freedom from the very bottom to the very top - and Russia is one of them
The last thing they need now is a fight for supremacy, similar to what we have in Ukraine, that would cripple their war effort and benefit only their enemies. The death or one of the opposition leaders may be considered as a small price to pay to avoid the 1917 like catastrophe. Today, with the abundance of nuclear weapons, the stakes for the whole world are much higher than then.
They have been following the same playbook since 2014. I'll tell you how it will go; Salami tactics.
Invasion of crimea, Annexation of parts of georgia, Annex Belarus, Annex Kiev, expand military and mining presence in the artic, Incite war in serbia with other baltic states, annex a modern yugoslavia.
At this point they will be the only major power who has been on a war footing for 10+ years. (US Skirmishes do not really count). They will have the inhouse manufacturing capabilities and knowledge to execute a ground war with the EU and will start by taking Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. I believe once they accomplish the above, they will be happy... for a generation or so.
Personally I have great hopes that an outsider like Kasparov could become President of Russia once Russia is defeated. He did attempt to run for presidency in 2007.
You do read the news? Ukraine is sinking the Russian Black Sea fleet ship by ship with cheap sea-drones. Ukraine is destroying Russian oil refineries and Russia has to reduce it's crude oil production now that India seems to saturated with cheap Russian oil.
On Ukraine ceding territory, I assume that's in case of a peace deal? Putin will sell that as a victory to the Russian people and prepare the next attack a few years later. This simply isn't an option for Europe to allow. Russia will crumble.
On what are you basing this assertion? I'm going to assume it's a flawed understanding of the oft-cited "3:1 rule", which a) isn't a rule, but a planning guideline b) never referred to casualty ratios, but to force ratios suggested for a successful attack.
>> Personally I have great hopes that an outsider like Kasparov could become President of Russia once Russia is defeated.
What influence does Kasparov have with Russia's security establishment? In other words, why would any of the men who actually wield power in the country support him?
The question to me was more what happens after? Terrorism inside Russia for years? Low bip for decades?
Nato setting a clear border
Trump winning would be bad news for Ukraine, but in practical terms they've already been thrown under the bus by Republicans in Congress.
He was just a useful figurehead to attract sympathies from the west, but he never posed any threat to Putin and even if he somehow got into power he would do nothing to change Russia for the better.
He died (was killed) because he no longer served a purpose for Putin.
Also slowly folding. It is not happening only in little countries like Slovakia. US has relevant party that is now openly pro-Putin.
What relevant party in the US is openly pro-Putin?
I assume you don't know much about Slovakia besides the few headlines that pop here and there, right ?
They aren’t the majority but are influential.
Xi Xinpeng should take a lesson here. Apparently all you have to do is dunk on gay people and pay lip service to right wing culture war stuff and they’ll roll over. You don’t even have to mean it. (Every core statistic the right claims to care about is worse in Russia like birth rate, divorce, abortion, etc.)
The Ukraine war is a tragedy and I hope it ends soon.
But they have no economical & military power to really do any harm the Europe & the US. Putin makes a lot of noise but really can't even win a few km's in Ukraine.
But the real threat is further east. China is slowly building it's empire, and it's a scary one. Taking over parts of Africa. Migrating it's people. Integrating it's tech worldwide. Making the world dependent while building it's own full independence.
Have you ever thought about what Russia's influence in the AI sector would be by now if they would have focused on developing it instead of starting a war? Developing it while pretending a peaceful cooperation with the West?
It might well be that China supports Russia's war effort so much because it knows that this way Russians will have zero time and resouces to focus on being an AI leader, and through it, a threat to China.
The biggest win for the US and China is that Russia will now never be at the cutting edge in AI development. The longer this war goes on, the better it will be for both the US and for China.
Even Europe will be more advanced than Russia during the next couple of decades.
The west needs to wake up, we're slowly sliding towards a world conflict. This is going to get worse before it gets better.
Edit: Russia is pushing westward not eastward!
Is there any examples in history of appeasement leading to less bloodshed?
There's a lot of things the West can do without throwing nukes at the problem:
- arming ourselves and our allies (especially Taiwan) to the teeth
- supporting exiled and in-country opposition
- intervening against hostile operations (such as "police stations") on our own soil
- strengthen links with "global south" countries to minimize Chinese/Russian influence on them, support local rebels against regimes that have already fallen towards Russia/China.
Generally you avoid conflict by being scary, not agreeable.
Russia does not honor the rules of law so we should not negotiate with them in good faith. They are a terrorist state.
UN Charter
Budapest Memorandum
INF Treaty
Minsk 2 / Minsk 1
...
I'm proposing we wake up and start doing the same, planning and drawing "do not cross" lines in the sand to hopefully limit the total/final scope of the conflict.
Yes this will force an earlier confrontation -- but WWII would have been a lot less bloody if Europe had stood up to Hitler earlier -- problem was everyone thought that appeasing him would make things better.
It's clear both Russia and China can't be appeased at this point. Both need to be checked.
As if the west hasn't already destabilized the middle east for many decades now.
We are screwed in the long run because there is no antidote to this that is compatible with our constitution.
> The west needs to wake up, we're slowly sliding towards a world conflict. This is going to get worse before it gets better.
I think there's an essential connection there: The West's values and their power, and peace and freedom. The West's power comes from its values, not only because it captures the hearts and minds of others but because the power freedom and universal human rights gives to its own people.
As many in the West disparage or undermine those values, they are doing the work of Putin and Xi (at times, I'm sure, led by their disinformation campaigns).
No more time for games. It's time, as you say, to wake up and stand up for our values.
This makes a nice tweet. But what does it actually mean in practice?
I don't have evidence, but my gut says that's not by accident. This slippery slope we've been heading down for the last few decades (no more right and wrong, all values are equal, anyone who says otherwise is a problem/oppressor/colonizer) look to me like a well funded / coordinated / long term political warfare campaign in order to build a country of "appeasers". People who refuse to stand up for anything -- we all know that's how bullies win.
I often wonder how much of what we're doing to ourselves is actually being funded by bad actors, fake patriots, etc.
I don't trust any free news. Someone is paying for a message to be delivered to my eyeballs, and I don't know who that is. Maybe 1% of stories are from bad actors, maybe it's 25%. Who knows? The answer matters -- a lot.
No one trusts anyone anymore. We've lost faith in our government and each other. No better way to conquer a nation than from within.
Things were set in motion years ago and they are slowly unraveling. When the West rejected Russia's deeper integration into its structures after the Cold War ended and expanded NATO towards the East this path was set in stone. The late 2000s were the absolute breaking point.
Major Eastern players are asymmetrically breaking US hegemony through proxies and internal conflict. They cannot face the US conventionally but it doesn't mean they cannot face the US. They can, they do and they will continue to do so.
Brexit, MAGA, Mideast conflicts, Ukraine, EU refugee crisis, inflation, energy crisis, recent development in North Korea, social media disinformation etc. etc. etc.
The BRICS countries (and others) are pursuing a multipolar, non-democratic world with heavily reduced US influence over Asia and Europe, who are now discussing defense independence and their own nuclear umbrella after Trump strategically placed some Russian talking points (again).
Your point would have been better made without weaseling in a Mearsheimer apology for authoritarian states. Russia snatching Ukraine has absolutely nothing to do with NATO's expansion. Indeed, had NATO expanded earlier, we wouldn't have found ourselves in this mess, with Ukraine left to fend for itself.
NATO grew because of the desperation of former USSR satellites to shelter themselves from their abuser.
As to the other bit here about rejecting Russian integration as a cause for war: I think that point has been proven quite wrong with Merkel's absurd fantasy that trade with Russia would bring peace.
How can an individual have both the critical thinking and still have the gut to contribute to this?
I grew up in rural russia. It's much much worse than what you see on the facade. My neighbour was a police man. His 15 years boy raped a kid from local orphanage and captured it on a video. No justice followed, because his dad is a policeman. No one spoke up. Everyone just accepted it, as they always do. When he grew up he became a policeman. It's not even the most screwed up story that I witnessed. This is beyond fucked up.
It's a case of mass inheritable PTSD. All males I knew in my family tree were violent drunks, all females were bitten up housewives. This place is surreal and should not exist. And my family was somewhat functional compared to some neighbours.
I abandoned everything there and got out as soon as I could make any money. I wish every person capable of critical thinking just leave this dreadful place and let it descend to the middle ages.
Personal experience has taught me that critical thinking does not nessecarily go hand in hand with the ability and/or the guts to push for change.
Many who move through corporate worlds do so for personal gains, and will not speak out against or put them selves in the spotlight to fix issues that might reflect badly on their upward progress in the hierarchy.
And from my interaction of these kinds of people, they have often been very intelligent.
I believe the same behaviour and motives sadly exist for many in modern day societies.
It is very hard to put myself in their shoes, and contort my brain to make their actions feel like a thing I could do.
In the following wikipedia article Russia's murder rate is near the world's avearage, close to the US, and 8 times lower than Jamaika. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intenti...
I don't begrudge you for doing that, as I would have done (and basically did) the same. But that also highlights how a lot of these places get more fucked up over time.
The same thing is happening/has happened in the US. Basically, nearly all of the opportunity has moved from rural areas to urban and suburban ones. So basically anyone with the slightest modicum of ambition gets up and leaves. So all the people that are left are the people (a) without ambition or (b) are stuck there for other reasons (e.g. lots of early pregnancy). But the end result is those rural areas fall further behind, and many of the people that stay there become even more embittered about their lot. In the US the effect is even more pronounced because rural areas have outsized voting rights due to the way the electoral college and Senate work.
Humanity must ensure that an individual has the way to realize their potential. Freedom to raise and freedom to fall.
The internet changed everything. The information flowing freely and allowing critical thinkers to get out of a swamp they found themselves in. At least this gives everyone a chance to see.
The other thing is immigration. Your case about the US is thankfully different because one can get on a car and leave to another state or urban area. It's not as easy to get out of russia. Get a visa first. Maybe. If you have education and fit into a category. Do not fit? Too bad, there are great places like Kazakhstan that are available though.
About 8% of the world suffers from PTSD symptoms. There was a recent study done in Poland that said over 15% of population has symptoms. It is generational PTSD from WW2.
I think it might've already...
Then submit it to authorities: investigative commitee, child ombudsmen, prosecutor's office, etc. Not local, but higher, maybe even central.
If the video is available, submit it too.
If not adressed by all authorities (unlikely), go public with the specific and detailed information.
Make sure to protect the victim's info from public.
This thread is in the midst of discussion of a public person tortured for 3 years and murdered and the whole country knows that.
What authorities are you talking about? It's criminals upon criminals.
Patriot and NASAMs batteries have been defending Ukraine for a while. ATACMS have been used against Russian air fields. F-16s aren't being used there is a lot of training first, but they have been delivered.
https://www.voanews.com/a/ukrainians-start-f-16-training-in-...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67135163
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/06/world/europe/ukraine-patr...
I don't remember whether the Patriot batteries came from the U.S. or were traded out of some European countries.
The U.S. could have supplied a lot of the advanced weapons much sooner, but Biden dithered. Supposedly Ukraine will get F-16s any day now.
For now, U.S. aid is being blocked by Republicans in Congress who insisted that Ukraine and Israel aid be lumped into a border bill, but then they abandoned the border bill and speaker Johnson is blocking a vote in the House. There's no policy reason for this, it's just that they want to make Biden look bad in an election year and a lot of representatives are afraid of angering Trump and his supporters.
- Annexation of Crimea (2014)
- MH17 Downing (2014)
- Intervention in Syria
- 2016 U.S. Election Interference
- Skripal Poisoning (2018)
- Anti-LGBTQ+ Laws
- Navalny Poisoning (2020)
- Wagner Group Activities
- Invasion of Ukraine (2022)
- Killing of Yevgeny Prigozhin (2023)
- Killing of Alexei Navalny (2024)
What is necessary for US and European Laws, to specify any type of contact, endorsement, indulgence even, of such a regime, is an intolerable criminal offense?
Edit: Its difficult to keep track...
- Killing of Alexander Litvinenko
- 1999 Russian Apartment Bombings
- September 2022 — Ravil Maganov's fatal fall from a hospital window. He was chairman of Russian oil giant Lukoil. Lukoil was the first major Russian company to call for an end to the war in Ukraine
- July 2009 — Natalya Estemirova found dead in a ditch
- October 2006 — Anna Politkovskaya murdered in an elevator
- April 2003 — Sergei Yushenkov murder was never solved. Yushenkov was one of the harshest critics of the Chechen war and the KGB's successor organization, the FSB.
- blowing up ammo storage in Czech Rep.
- Beslan school siege
- Keystone Pipeline and Freeport LNG fire
- electricity and internet cable sabotage
And I mean this in sad, sombre way. Russian imperialism has never really stopped, it just had an interregnum in the form of a drunkard President, who was promptly replaced.
* instantly removes the need for oil and gas * instantly protects half of the world from nukes and radiations
(if possible, that would have done this 15 years ago.)
Now, as much as everyone, I loved reading the headlines in HN that told me about the new "energy breaktrough that will change everythin" - meanwhile, in the real world, we're stuck with oil & gas, and the countries owning it are basically free to behave as they please. Understandably, they behave... badly (except for Norway, I suppose ?)
But it's good that Silicon Valley stopped caring about producing energy, and is now mostly worried about to worst spend it in VR helmets and training AIs to generate fake porn.
Given the state of "reality", it's only fitting that we deal mostly in lies and head-burying.
For the second point, I don't think there is even anything in sight, so Putin's opponents are bound to only tread carefully with Putin.
With the Republican delaying aid, Trump almost certain to get back at the WH, and the fall of Adviivka just a couple of days away - this is, in objective terms, a good time to be sitting in the Kremlin.
The only certainty, however, is that, through diplomacy, artillery, or biology, the tides will turn. Navalny probably wished he would be there to see it. Fate decided otherwise.
"To the beggar: This, too, shall pass.
To the emperor: This, too, shall pass.
This, too, shall pass."
Barred anti-war Russian presidential candidate [Boris Nadezhdin] fails in two legal challenges [0]
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/barred-anti-war-russian...
But I guess why would he pretend to have democracy? The Russians certainly don't buy it, and the countries that might care have already cut all ties. I wonder why he bothers to have the election charade?
If he wouldn't be able to regularly display that he has control over the country, it'll be easier for some opportunistic group to organize a coup..
Still sucks it had to come to this. But I agree, this wasn't the unexpected outcome.
I truly hope his death will not be in vain.
As I mentioned earlier - does anyone remember the guy who flew over Belarus and had his plane redirected to the capital, and he was seized there. He also was a protester, now forgotten. I do not even remember his name and never heard of him since then.
Navalny on the other hand has done many notable things and was in the news all the time before his death. His is the first name you think of when you think of Russian opposition. This is not a valid comparison.
Navalny all but certainly was aware of his likely martyrdom, and appears to have won that. I have my doubts that he will be more effective as a martyr than he would have been acting in exile. In addition to whatever organisation remains, he does leave both a wife and daughter, though whether or not they'll carry on his fight I don't know.
The news today is not unexpected, but disappointing all the same.
From a practical point of view it may not be wise, but as a principled decision, it sends a very powerful message.
Navalny calculated that this process would be watched and documented through to the very end. He hoped that might be significant, perhaps even sufficient.
Of course we The West jump to the fantastical conclusion that he, an opposition leader in Russia, wants everything that we want and would be the seedling of prosperity of Russia but also (most importantly) wants to be friends and buddies with The West.
Not surprised to see your comment at the very bottom of this thread by the way.
Oh, that reminds me about people in russian internet who said that Navalny was managed from Kremlin. They kept saying this even when he went to prison.
Do you as well believe in the shadow government which controls every public figure?
Navalny being a Russian chauvinist should be utterly unsurprising: it would be significantly stranger for Russian opposition to be a stereotypical '60s hippie as opposed to, you know, Russian.
American news media is all about the narratives and they love heroes and martyrs. I imagine in the next couple of weeks this guy will be turned into the Russian MLK of some kind, some comment here already made the comparison. It's just unreal how blatantly manipulative the whole thing is.
There simply aren't enough young men there to keep the Russian population growing and the population there doesn't value diversity enough to consider producing more Russian children with immigrants.
This is what many believe (e.g., Peter Zeihan) to be the real reason behind the invasion of Ukraine. Ukraine is "Russian enough" in their eyes, so combining the two populations would help stave off demographic collapse.
This does not make any sense. Banning birth-control would be the most cost-effective way to increase the birth-rate, stronger social programs being a strong second.
Much of what I've heard from Zeihan sound memey – like camp-fire stories or what your older brothers friends would tell you – without anything meaningful to back it up.
Rest in peace.
He was a Russian politician and was intending to stay one. In the eyes of Russian public opinion, a politician who fled abroad - opposition or not - is not a politician anymore, but some foreign guy living in comforts of some Germany or England, either on money stolen from Russians or on the payroll of CIA, not worth listening to. Interests of polit-emigrants and interests of Russians in Russia do not align, and the general public knows that.
This is why Navalny returned and Yashin never left.
Earlier murder attempt by the state, plus an arrest afterwards -- were still arguably unprecedented (Nemtsov 2015 murder being a bit different), plus his all-in investigation on Putin's palace, could theoretically end people's patience, and that protests would have been even broader than in Belarus in 2020.
Plus, his team were all die-hards, no skeptics.
That was all-in move, and it turned out wrong.
I also went to those protests, it was -23°C, and there were more SWAT police than us. I got a harsh reminder as well of the sad truths sociologist Yuri Levada had described in his work "Simple Soviet man".
Russia is not something anyone can solve from the outside; they have to figure it out themselves. Same for the Europe & the US, there are enough things to figure out here.
Putin is not in that place because he's somehow an extremely talented (or extremely lucky) person. Putin is there because that's what most of the Russian elite wants. Once he's gone, the Russian elite will put there somebody else who will fit them the most. It would not be reasonable to expect any drastic difference given the unchanging circumstances.
We just need to get our act together, not every country building or buying it's own incompatible weapons (like tanks, planes, frigates). The war in Ukraine shows how bad it is to run a war with ten different models of tanks etc.
And we can - at last - close Ramstein, Landstuhl and Weilerbach in Germany, no longer supporting US wars in the Middle East and beyond.
Living as a kid through the 70s and 80s with the PershingII/NATO Double-Track Decision I also would not have thought this threat is coming back the way it did.
[0] I'm sure Germany will not proceed on it's $10b F-35 plans
While I agree that European countries should start to take their defense seriously I don't see how you fault US support of Ukraine.
One thing you're missing in lots of your predictions is that Ukraine had no US military presence. Poland does. There's 10k US troops in Poland right now. There's zero chance other European countries will be closing US military bases with the looming threat from Russia.
That's absolutely not the sentiments among Poles. If anything, there's a belief we can only rely on US when poo hits the fan.
Why would that be the outcome? Why wouldn't it result in European countries wanting more US involvement? Who wouldn't want the most powerful country in the world on their side, as their ally?
Also, I strongly disagree with the idea that separately, the US and Europe are somehow stronger. Separately, countries end up in conflict - Europe's own history shows it especially, and that's one of the primary, intentional reasons for NATO and the EU. Together they are far more powerful - NATO is far more powerful than any country alone, including the US.
The EU - which for all its flaws is, if you step back and look from an historical perspective, arguably the greatest international organization in history - still lacks effective, unified international relations. Decisions require unanimity, which is hard for a small organization, and now they have dozens of members. Kissinger famously said (iirc), 'if I have to call Europe, who do I call?' They don't yet have the political structure and institutions to conduct international relations as whole.
Finally, power in international relations ultimately flows from wealth and population. If China continues to grow, it could have an economy twice the size of the EU's (or US's) within decades, and India has potential for similar growth. Together, the US and EU offer a much stronger balance.
This is an interesting read on the US sending more than half ($47.38b / $88.94b) [0] of the total worldwide military aid allocated so far to Ukraine.
[0] https://www.ifw-kiel.de/publications/ukraine-support-tracker...
Well, here's another example of the thing that most of those who grew up in that culture know or feel subliminally: the hero always crushes evil and triumphs at the end of the story. But in real life, for every success there are thousands that wither along the way.
"learned helplessness" yes
"calling them weak, docile, etc." - I'm not aware of this going on in any meaningful scale.
About the "learned helplessness" and general apathy it's true and the product of many things, one of them a very targeted effort to make the people internalize this during a whole century. China is very similar in this regard too.
All those "decadent" western democracies went through periods of very violent internal wars, centuries of constant internal "cold wars" where the main objective was "democracy" that includes many things like separation of State/Justice/Free Speech, a minimum standard of living ( not just economic ) that society itself does not tolerate existing below that, etc. I'm talking about the real practical thing, not the "cerimonies" or the theatrical plays of "democracy" authoritarian regimes like to show.
Russia never had that, it had a lot of violence, but for other reasons. One of the main one is Imperialism.
"Russia" in reality is pretty much just Moscow and nearby lands, but Russians have imperialism in their psyche. That's why the Baltics, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, etc are considered "brother" nations. Because most people in Russia would see no problem if they were somehow "peacefully" integrated in Russia.
But when it comes to pay the price, Russians are "apathetic" because even with all those big speeches and grandiose imperial ego, they know anyone who shows initiative becomes a target.
I don't think it will happen anytime soon, but the best thing to happen to Russia would be to breakup in other states as much as this stupid brutality has been to keep it's internal integrity. That's also why they are always inventing evil external enemies.
I think the triumph of good over evil is a bias we all share, to recognize the complexity, well, that involves a healthy amount of skepticism. I think underlying it is probably a decent ethic, once we define good/logos/love/god. Defining something doesn't mean we still aren't influenced by it
<< the hero always crushes evil and triumphs at the end of the story. But in real life, for every success there are thousands that wither along the way.
I think even in US kids learn really fast that there are no heroes; especially these days. One could argue this is one of the factors so many have withdrawn to easier past times.
USA was able to gradually turn from some positions to different others. For Russia it seems the current situation is still the fall to the deeper chasms of self-destruction.
If you are comparing him to MLK, you've not seen Navalny's videos on Central Asians I guess (in case you need a summary: compares them to insects that need to be exterminated then kills one with a handgun).
"Disregard the wars that the US gets into, have you seen their cars and houses?"
And it did work for a long time. People would give you a lot of leeway if you had a nice house and a car.
My assumptions: 1) He was killed, but why now? 2) He died because Russians' prison has a really bad conditions of detention - so his health was declining over time
And plausibility seems a good reason for "why now". You need to be very naïve to not strongly suspect foul play here, or in other cases of people falling out windows and whatnot, but you can also never be quite sure. Not really. So there is at least some plausibility that it was "just" an accident, or "just" illness, at least when trying to sell this to the Russian people.
In advance, one assumes.
Somehow this got me flipping through a book by Anna Politkovskaya, Russian journalist extraordinaire who covered the Second Chechen War and was shot dead in Moscow in 2006, on the birthday of Putin. [2]
I want to think that the age of massive online information does make at least a slight difference as to how much of the reasons behind events like these see the light of day eventually. Rest in peace, Alexei Navalnyi.
1: https://news.err.ee/1609255851/historian-navalny-s-death-wil... (Interestingly, the paragraph on Navalnyi being more of a disturbance now, after being declared dead, was not included in the English version of this news story. This is quite surprising, since ERR is actually a very well balanced source of news. All in all, that story includes interesting takes on Navalny as a politician, too, by another highly respeced Russia expert from Estonia.)
2. Lithuanians are not Slavs.
It will be interesting to see what they do now. This is definitely a loyalty test for them. Those who speak out against Putin at this point will be excised from the party.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68309496
and this:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68266447
My country is spending around 1.4% of GDP for defense, therefore it made into the list of countries he would encourage Putin to invade. The guy apparently doesn't know about the over 100 (publicly known) USA military bases and the American people working there (around 13000).
Also, Reuters is really showing its bias here by incessantly referring to Putin as "the former KGB spy". Imagine if an article about Reagan while he was president referred to him constantly as "the former Hollywood actor".
That's not the problem. Here we are all batting our eyes, but that doesn't help. Thousands of Russians went out to the streets to protest the war and got arrested without making a difference.
I'm very unclear on what kind of sacrifice would be required at this stage to change the situation in Russia.
Alexei believed in doing what’s right, not what’s easy. In his honour, let’s all do our part to help the truth prevail.
How are these events viewed internally in Russia? Is it just widely known that the government arranged it and it was “good, because he was a traitor”?
I hope we don't have similar news about Julian Assange someday soon.
Navalny was far from a saint, but his death is still a Kremlin job by any measure, and I suspect will only accelerate Putin's decline, as the state of Russian affairs continues to degrade.
And then a lot of angry Poles doing a blitz across Bielorussia.
At that point shit either goes Nuclear or Russia retreats.
I just don’t see Russian tanks across Berlin.
PS: hopefully now of this ever happens
And while it's easy to armchair guestimate Russia and its future, we western folk simply cant truly understand the nation and its people. They've endured WWII, USSR and some say take pride in how much they've suffered.
But Europe certainly should get its act together, especially regarding its ammo production. There was plenty of time to ramp up after Crimea,now the improvements are predicted to finish in couple of years. And US is again proving its indecideness in maintaining foreign policy.
The war in Ukraine is existential to Putins Russia and I am wishing the democratic nations win. However, I'm not holding my breath. It's the same as having a street fight. Without outside inference, the one who is more willing for absolute violence most likely wins.
"There's this new guy, Flapin. Good strong name, let's make him our leader! What could possibly go wrong?"
prisons are bad for your health
It's wild to me how everyone has a (very energetic) opinion about a conflict nowhere near their home, helmed by people they don't know, fought by people they don't understand, over problems they don't understand.
I wish we could return to when not every conflict between nations was a considered a global emergency.
Edit: Practice systemic awareness. This was not a throwaway comment.
Though the percentage of active duty military members has fluctuated since 2001, it has declined by 39% since 1987, its most recent high.
[1] Anastasia Vasilyeva: Navalny’s harassment and FBK’s deception /// EMPATHY OF MANUCHI https://youtu.be/ei-9Wh_jaCs
[2] YandexGPT a short summary of the video from the neural network https://300.ya.ru/v_6k8mRO4e?t=1063