How many ordinary Russians do you know? Obviously self selecting here but the handful I know can't stand the man and hate the direction that Russia is heading.
Ukraine Invasion - Please do not post videos showing attacks/similar
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How many ordinary Russians do you know? Obviously self selecting here but the handful I know can't stand the man and hate the direction that Russia is heading.
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I think if I was living in Russia I'd "approve" of Putin as well, wouldn't want a visit from the lads at the FSB that's for sure.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ies-troops-killed-in-ukraine?CMP=share_btn_tw
Interesting report on the number of Russian troops who are dying, it's especially interesting that there are reports of soldiers and sailors refusing to carry out some orders due to illegal way Russia is handling this conflict.
Soldato
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The reality is that a nation's leader .... no matter what the people thought of him/her previously .... when they are faced with what they perceive as a threat from outside their borders will rally around the leader. This has been shown countless times and is a well known phenomena.
What exactly is this threat Russia is facing? No country with nuclear weapons worries about its territory, what makes Russia special?
On the off chance that you're not taking the ****, for decades now NATO expansion has been encroaching closer and closer to Russia's border, allowing former SSR's to join (in blatant violation of previous agreements with Russia). New countries join and NATO forces/missiles are deployed there, closer and closer. The US is once again putting missiles in Turkey (which is what created the Cuban missile crisis, one of the most heated moments in the cold war).
The are enemies at Russia's doorstep, and now a Western backed revolution in Ukraine has resulted in the chance of a NATO member bordering Russia, a blatant act of aggression (technically it would be an act of war under the agreements between Russia/NATO to never do such a thing).
Is that the agreement that only Russia claims exists? Russia only has itself to blame for NATO enlargement - given the way she behaves whenever she feels her sphere of influence is diminishing you can understand why a post-Soviet state might want to take steps from being invaded again.
Contradiction.
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Yes NATO is a big and nasty thing allowing country's to join via peaceful means, while rolling tanks troops over a sovereign border to "aid independent elections elections" at gunpoint (Crimea) or to "protect russian speaking people" (eastern Ukraine) is fine.
Even if a treaty on NATO expatiation was broken the response from Russia has been blown out of proportions. As for NATO being enemies of russia there doing a fine job of making that worse. Running up to the Ukraine crisis my understanding Euro/NATO/US relations had been getting a lot better.
If the Crimea or eastern Ukraine want to be independent there are far more peaceful (if slower) means of doing so
Wasn't a serious point, just mocking the pro-Putin mob and their standard argument that any country Russia invades "brought in on themselves" somehow.
That said, I don't know why anyone would think it was valid argument to suggest that an independent country shouldn't join any alliance that it wanted to. If Russia wanted to retain these countries in her sphere of influence then maybe they should have offered a better alternative to oligarchism, corruption and basic human rights violations.
Well, if you ignore all the now declassified UK/US/German/etc documents where it is made very clear that Russia was told that if it allowed free elections in Hungary that Hungary would never be allowed to join NATO (Hungary joined in 1999), and of course the time the US secretary of state stood in the Kremlin and told everyone that if East Germany was allowed to join NATO as part of it's reunification that the would be "no extension of NATO's jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east", and all the other recorded documentation by numerous countries.
Then yes.
The simple matter is that NATO made numerous promises and then when the Russian economy was weak broke them all.
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I heard Malcolm Rifkind talk about this agreement on TV when he was asked about the Crisis. He has been Defence Sec and Foreign Sec so he should know a bit about it.
Gorby talked about NATO triumphalism.
The US talks about American exceptionalism. It will not obey international laws because it sees itself as above other countries. A dangerous, dangerous mindset for the rest of the world.
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Almost sounds like its ok for Russia to annexe parts of the Ukraine because country's joined Nato/Eu ?
What are you talking about? The Cold War ended, the Soviet Union lost, there's only one superpower left (the US) and its main enemy is religious fundamentalism, which threatens its allies in the Middle East. If every other country in the world joined NATO, that would have zero real effects on Russia and its integrity. The paranoia which affects many of the Russian leaders is one of the main reasons for the mess in the Ukraine, the US isn't an enemy, there's nothing Russian that the US wants..
"technically it would be an act of war under the agreements between Russia/NATO to never do such a thing"
What a silly claim... The Baltic states and Poland, they're members and they have borders with Russia, why didn't the war start when they joined?
Russia's economy is going from bad to worse so the leaders are making things up to divert the attention from the real issues, that's all there is to it.
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If we handled situation in Ukraine differently, Putin already wouldve been on pitch forks...
All we had to do, is show the Russians that a country can rise up against its greedy leaders and throw them out while maintaining independence from outside influences and elect people who had sense in their brain and were truly interested in well being of the whole nation.
Instead, we showed Russians that we bank rolled weak fascists who are licking western bum hole, flash EU flag more than their own and salute their Nazi past.
Try to ban Russian language the first thing they came into power and refuse any talks of federalization to allow eastern regions to hail its own heroes and language.
All we had to do is make Maidan about people taking matter in their own hands and being strong independantly, rather than running around with Nazi-filled portraits and flags along with EU flag, once Yanukovich was gone, we should`ve pushed through a leader who represented both East and West rather than the West to which the eastern population responded as a defeat and took up arms to protect themselves, you can not expect Russians to sit back while what in their eyes seem as a Nazi government being imposed on them which forbids their language and burns down any hope of decentrilised power.
If the Junta wasnt so pro western and so far right, Crimea would never have happend, only reason why Russians had any chance there is because people in Crimea truly believed that their being/language/history were at risk... And guess what, they were right.
People seem to forget that Donbass, only requested for federalization to take place which would allow people in the east to protect their language and way of life.
Instead they first got called federalists, then seperatists and then terrorists... Now they are just being called Russian forces since the Ukraine media outtake on the situation that people of Donbass are pro-ukraine and the only people fighting there is the Russian army.
Over and over the Ukraine government has shown it gives absolute zero damn about opinion of nearly of half of its country who consider themselves Russians.
To Russians in Russia, it all seems as if we pushed through a Nazi party who is doing everything it can to eradicate the Russians while being widely supported and bank rolled by the West.
Good luck convincing them otherwise now, because I cant blame them for thinking that way, we showed it to them that way.
It just seems as if we messed up on every single stage on purpose to consolidate Putins Power in Russia... I just refuse to believe that thousands of intelligence personnel did not see how this would all play out in Putins favor, its either we have planned it from the begining or we are truly dumb beyond belief.
All we had to do, is show the Russians that a country can rise up against its greedy leaders and throw them out while maintaining independence from outside influences and elect people who had sense in their brain and were truly interested in well being of the whole nation.
Instead, we showed Russians that we bank rolled weak fascists who are licking western bum hole, flash EU flag more than their own and salute their Nazi past.
Try to ban Russian language the first thing they came into power and refuse any talks of federalization to allow eastern regions to hail its own heroes and language.
All we had to do is make Maidan about people taking matter in their own hands and being strong independantly, rather than running around with Nazi-filled portraits and flags along with EU flag, once Yanukovich was gone, we should`ve pushed through a leader who represented both East and West rather than the West to which the eastern population responded as a defeat and took up arms to protect themselves, you can not expect Russians to sit back while what in their eyes seem as a Nazi government being imposed on them which forbids their language and burns down any hope of decentrilised power.
If the Junta wasnt so pro western and so far right, Crimea would never have happend, only reason why Russians had any chance there is because people in Crimea truly believed that their being/language/history were at risk... And guess what, they were right.
People seem to forget that Donbass, only requested for federalization to take place which would allow people in the east to protect their language and way of life.
Instead they first got called federalists, then seperatists and then terrorists... Now they are just being called Russian forces since the Ukraine media outtake on the situation that people of Donbass are pro-ukraine and the only people fighting there is the Russian army.
Over and over the Ukraine government has shown it gives absolute zero damn about opinion of nearly of half of its country who consider themselves Russians.
To Russians in Russia, it all seems as if we pushed through a Nazi party who is doing everything it can to eradicate the Russians while being widely supported and bank rolled by the West.
Good luck convincing them otherwise now, because I cant blame them for thinking that way, we showed it to them that way.
It just seems as if we messed up on every single stage on purpose to consolidate Putins Power in Russia... I just refuse to believe that thousands of intelligence personnel did not see how this would all play out in Putins favor, its either we have planned it from the begining or we are truly dumb beyond belief.
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When are you leaving for Moscow? and did you miss the interviews with the Russian Regular soldiers who are fighting in Ukraine?The Nazi party of Russia invaded and started ethnic cleansing in Crimea
oh wait you also seem to forget that small part as well.
Jews being bulldozed out.....
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