I will never understand why it has to be this way and Russia cannot be a normal country that has the goal to join the EU and be prosperous instead of doing nonsense for over a hundred years now.
A thousand years almost. As a Pole I have no faith in Russia ever becoming anything other than a savage hostile wart on this planet. It's not just their leadership. It's the nation. More accurately their culture. Their malice is a result of a rare combination of ineptitude and megalomania all in one package.
Not anymore. Marie Antoinette literally had to lose her head for this to happen. Mustache man too, suffering humiliating total defeat. What happened to Russia? They killed their czar and got soviets that destroyed most of the legacy of Russian empire. They live in a constant dissonance ever since because their fake red empire was never a system to last, but it introduced enough destruction to kill religion and their ability to perceive world through a rational lens.
>Marie Antoinette literally had to lose her head for this to happen.
Arguably it was actually Robespierre losing is head that had to happen to stop the madness (Terror) in France, or at least create the conditions for it to stop eventually.
I don't know what has to happen in Russia. It is possible for autocratic states, that have always been autocratic, to transition to liberal democracy. It did happen in France, but even after the end of the Terror it still went through a long phase of imperial autocracy. It takes time to develop institutions strong enough to resist autocracy.
Russia needs to find a new identity. Someone like Navalny might have led it out of the blind alley it was in. I still hope after Putin dies there is some good changes as young people, at least the educated ones, don't share Putin's twisted worldview at all.
No, Navalny was never “the guy”, he’s literally jokingly referred to as “the buterbrod” (sandwich) because of his comments about Crimea (“Crimea is not a sandwich to be passed around” in the context of “returning” Crimea to Ukraine).
“Russian liberalism stops at the border of Ukraine”
You omit the fact that he took those words back and said “Crimea is Ukraine” while being in prison, knowing well it will not make his life (and death) easier
> He and his cohort were sponsored by the West and the West clearly loves Russian people and wish us the best possible future, yeah, we believe.
Why do you not believe this? As someone who identifies as Western, I want for all people's to prosper. I don't think I've ever talked to anyone in Europe or the US who had it out for Russians. All resentment send exclusively be towards nationalists.
For the same reason no one in the West believed Putin when he said expanding NATO was not necessary since Russia was not the enemy anymore. The West still wanted to allow ex Soviet countries to join NATO even if that would cause hostility from Russia. It really is a self fulfilling prophecy caused by mistrust from both sides. It’s always so easy to blame only one side when you’re strongly biased towards one of the sides, but if you look at it from a neutral perspective, clearly both sides behaved in a way as to make the current situation completely unavoidable. And neither is willing to make a change now and will just double down until one side is completely defeated. Russia alone has no chance, but if when shit hits the fan its BRICS friends continue to back it up, we may be heading to something even more disastrous than WWII. I am not optimistic.
Yes it is if it was the case that the whole purpose of the neighborhood watch was to contain me, and breaking into your house was in my view the best defense against allowing you to contain me.
Russia has a history of raping, pillaging, and stealing land from their neighbors with NATO acting as the only (somewhat) successful defense against that so far.
Your idea of ‘containment’ in this sense means you’re defending the equivalent of a gang of serial rapists and murderers entering innocent people’s homes, taking their families hostage, and saying the home is now theirs.
I'm asking seriously: do you really believe that if Ukraine ever joined NATO (which is dubious as they already requested in 2008 but their request was denied), it would actually attack Russia?
The question is whether NATO would attack Russia through Ukraine. And if you don’t think that’s absolutely possible you need to read history books. I think it’s actually very possible it will happen within the next few years, in fact, given the rhetoric coming from the UK, Baltic states and some other EU countries.
So explain why the countries neighboring Russia are building all possible border fortifications, spending large sums of money for something that would make any invasion much more difficult.
> The West still wanted to allow ex Soviet countries to join NATO even if that would cause hostility from Russia.
I find it hard to understand people still use this argument with the straight face. NATO is not an entity that expands itself - individual countries, like Sweden or Finland, request to join it to protect themselves from the situation when Russia attacks them and they have to fight alone like Ukraine. Of course Putin hates that as he cannot fulfill his dream of expanding Russia to the borders of Soviet Union, but this argument doesn't stand any scrutiny.
He was called worse names. Nevrtheless, he did something past Russian heroes did: voluntarily sacrificed his life. He knew Putin will kill him but decided to go back anyway. Yes, you may say it "dumb". But the mere existence of such a strong spirit gives me hope that someone else who actually cares for Russians, for their wellbeing, for their future, can actually undo all this mess Putin got Russia into.
And that was the best thing navalny ever done -- minus one imperialistic russian bastard.
I really hope his loyal beloved wife soon follows his footsteps instead of spreading imperialistic russian propaganda.
Your enemy is not the people of the country you hate, it’s the government. If you believe it’s the people then you are a victim to propaganda, or some other source of highly biased information.
Think about what war really is, it’s almost always a bunch of powerful people who have a disagreement with a bunch of other powerful people, who then have to trick a bunch of less powerful people to fight on their behalf. If you feel like fighting you’ve been tricked.
When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.
No, it can be both the government, and the people.
The government for all of the reasons you say.
The people because they have fallen for and accepted propaganda. Thereby leading them to support the government and its toxic narratives.
I base this opinion mostly on seeing how Russian propaganda has poisoned my mother-in-law's mind. Many media reports and various other sources have verified that she is not an isolated example, most Russians accept the same propaganda narratives.
There's plenty of propaganda on our side as well. Let's, for the sake of argument, say that the west was orchestrating regime change in Ukraine with the end goal of regime change in Russia, knowing it would lead to war. We would never know about it. The organizations in the west that handle geopolitical issues are not that different from those of Russia. They're not transparent or democratic, yet we rely on them for our information. They can probably steer us the way they want as easily as they do in Russia. The free media does not have access to the information it would need to truly inform the public.
> Let's, for the sake of argument, say that the west was orchestrating regime change in Ukraine with the end goal of regime change in Russia, knowing it would lead to war.
OK, let's play this game. The logical fallacy here is the relationship between regime change in Ukraine and Russia. These are two distinct countries. It's like saying someone wanted to influence the outcome of the election in the USA to cause regime change in Canada. (I use this example because we know Russians were influencing the elections in the USA.)
A simply more unsettling conclusion from this narrative is that if there is a causal link indeed, and Ukraine taking a pro-EU direction can cause a regime change in Russia, it means that the basis of the latter is very weak - so weak it has to start the war to prevent its fall.
> The logical fallacy here is the relationship between regime change in Ukraine and Russia. These are two distinct countries. It's like saying someone wanted to influence the outcome of the election in the USA to cause regime change in Canada.
Would the US not be forced to react in some way if a pro-china party took over in Canada with the help of chinese influence? And China had the goal of integrating Canada into its military alliance?
This in no way excuses anything currently going on, but I think you are missing the forest for the trees and flying off the handle without engaging with a valid point of discussion because it wasn't a perfect example.
One can condemn the invasion while also considering what would happen if a US neighbor cozied up with its geopolitical rivals. How about the Soviet Union/Cuba? How did the US react to that?
We all know how they reacted, so there is no need for hypotheticals that serve no purpose. And in the last 9 months the US has made multiple strong suggestions that they think that Canada should 'join' the US (by hook, crook, or force) and they've threatened to annex Greenland (similarly) and are currently in the process of setting up a military offensive against Venezuela.
We don't need fairytales, we have history and present day events to guide us.
Okay, but then what point are you attempting to make? You are arguing against the comparison, but then go on to describe other aggressive acts instead. As though to seethe, "it's not an apple, it's a fruit!"
> Would the US not be forced to react in some way if a pro-china party took over in Canada with the help of chinese influence?
This sets you up for saying 'no'
> And China had the goal of integrating Canada into its military alliance?
And this denies Canada the right to engage into treaties.
Neither of which has any bearing on the topic and on actual reality, there is no 'pro china' party in Canada and even if there was the US would not be 'forced to react'. It probably would react but it would not be forced to do so.
So this all just muddies the water by 'just asking questions'. We should stick to reality rather than engaging in positioning strawmen for the express purpose of taking them down, we have an actual war going on right now with a belligerent that is committing warc rimes by the hundreds on a daily basis and which was started on the pretext of another sovereign nation being a threat when that clearly wasn't the case.
That is the topic (see title). Besides that, the hypothetical does not stand even in principle because the US has been the aggressor in very recent history.
So I'm not just arguing against the comparison, I'm questioning the value of making such comparisons in principle because they are just attempts at sowing discord without any basis in fact. If you see it differently then you're welcome that.
I think there is value in treating other actors with some semblance of rationality and using that to gain insight into how one might deal with them, rather than considering them fully sui generis.
For example it would be a similar mistake to think that the recent swing in US politics is a uniquely American phenomenon to which one's own population is inherently immune.
If instead one thinks, maybe we're not so different after all, perhaps one may better understand how better to deal with it.
Especially if the alternatives are, "we just need to get rid of the bad people" or "I guess there's no hope for a better world"
> For example it would be a similar mistake to think that the recent swing in US politics is a uniquely American phenomenon to which one's own population is inherently immune.
Indeed it would be and I'm under no such illusion, rather the opposite. Unfortunately as much as I do it will never be enough. But I'm putting as much time, money and effort into that as my means and energy levels allow.
> If instead one thinks, maybe we're not so different after all, perhaps one may better understand how better to deal with it.
Oh, but we are different, on an individual level. It's as soon as you start talking about 'China' or the 'USA' as homogenous entities with plans and responses (rational or otherwise) that the trouble starts. Before you know it you've defined an in-group and an out-group and that is precisely when rationality gets thrown out.
> Especially if the alternatives are, "we just need to get rid of the bad people" or "I guess there's no hope for a better world"
I don't think we can get rid of bad people, but what we can do is identify them and keep them from the levers of power. The fact that the world over we keep finding megalomaniacs in these positions even though we full well know what it leads to is something that we will have to deal with sooner or later.
And as for hope for a better world, I think that that hope should be rooted in really learning our lessons from the past rather than insisting on re-learning them every couple of generations.
"The West" is not a unified entity, and the interests of Western countries almost never align.
Remember how mainstream media was reporting in 2003 that Powell is obviously lying? How the whole debacle about Iraqi WMDs was little more than a thinly veiled excuse to finish the war Bush Sr had started? Maybe that didn't happen in your country, but it was the reality in many Western countries.
Consider the business as usual in the EU. Whatever the EU is trying to do, there are always some countries that oppose it. Then there are negotiations, and some kind of compromise is ultimately reached, but nobody is truly happy about it. That's what decentralization does to you.
Or maybe consider Russia just before the invasion of Ukraine. Some countries and factions in the West considered Russia an important trading partners, while others saw it as an adversary and wanted to cut ties with it. There was no unified Western policy on anything related to Russia.
You're missing my point. I'm not saying the west did anything wrong. I'm saying that if it did do those things, nothing would be different, and therefore we are just as much pawns of our leaders as the russians are.
People living in Ukraine now clearly don't like that Zelenskiy cancelled the elections and don't want to sign peace agreement. Why they don't go to the streets and protest?
To add to this, culture can be changed significantly in a short period. See how the USA has changed in the past 20 years, the culture has changed 2 or 3 times now with vastly different values & attitudes between each. What does each period have in common? Thick gobs of propaganda being push in every nook & cranny. And lack of critical thinking on the individual level. If country X wants to change, it is very possible, its just a matter of time, persistence & brain washing. Brain washing the youth is the easiest path, especially if in the opposite direction than what their parents/elderly want.
Russia or not, somehow, team Red and team Blue picked cards on who's on which team, and we're not allowed to have differing opinions about who should be on what side.
I have to admit, I've never been persuaded by this western idea that if you get rid of Putin, everything will be better.
I'm not sure what part of Russian history, or contemporary Russian society, gives people confidence in this idea?
I'm not being anti-Russian here either. I feel the same way about our nation here in the US. Even if we were to rid ourselves of Trump for instance, we would still have serious issues with a large body of people who support Trump-like policies. A wise Europe would still be obliged to be on guard against us.
Every nation has belligerent elements. Russia is no different. While, say, Putin, may be an expression of that belligerent element, I'm unconvinced that he is the belligerent element itself. I think it's foolish, potentially fatal, to make that assumption.
During World War 2 it was believed that the Germans will never change and will always be a source of conflict in europe (or worse). There were wild ideas like the Morgenthau Plan to completely dismantle any German ability to wage war.
But it turns out a very militarized nation can become completely pacifist after suffering a complete utter defeat, suffering and destruction.
Culture can change, just like 1990s Russia was a break from past and future Russia. However the 1990s were a disaster and thus the culture changes went to the opposite side
Before the 2014 conflict in Donbas and annexation of Krimea, things were going in the right direction with Europe and Russia being big commercial partners. The Ukrainian revolution is seen as good by most Westerners, but that was really what started the open hostilities with Russia. Russia had a deal with the Ukrainians and that deal was undone by the revolution in favor with a deal with the EU, not to mention the 2008 Bucharest Memorandum that said Ukraine was to become part of NATO eventually together with Georgia. The Russians immediately invaded Georgia to prevent that from happening and that should have made it clear Ukraine could be next… but the US didn’t care and went ahead with openly supporting the Maiden. The writing was on the wall and the war was just a matter of time after that. Both sides keep escalating since then. I’m quite sure that if Trump doesn’t manage to stop this war , it will spill into Europe very soon and as in world war 2, everyone will lose almost everything before any good comes of it.
There was no such thing as 2008 Bucharest Memorandum, you are probably confusing it with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. But NATO did hold a summit in Bucharest in 2008. Ukraine and Georgia hoped to get invitations to join NATO. Under Russian pressure, they were denied entry, and that was the end of it. This left Georgia and Ukraine outside NATO's protective umbrella and enabled Russia to invade both without triggering a response from the entire alliance.
The "eventually" you are referring to was nothing more than a polite "no", issued in the final statement of the summit as a consolation (one day we will invite you), after allies had made their negative decision.
When you say eventually, clearly the other side should take it seriously , wouldn’t you? Or again are we going into “they should believe us, but only sometimes” ??
Polite rejection letters often end with an upbeat, noncommittal note about the possibility of things being different in an undefined future. Saying that this opened the door for Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is incorrect; the allies decided on the opposite at the summit.
Georgia and Ukraine hoped to receive an invitation to NATO and begin membership negotiations. Today, almost two decades later, they still haven't received an invitation nor started negotiations.
This is not a "Bucharest Memorandum", but a memorandum of a convo between Bush and Putin, which happened on April 6th of 2008. What you are talking about is from [0], and you should not believe Putin's words verbatim. Remember: he likes to "teach" history people from other side of the world. He cherrypicks some facts, omits other facts, distorts some other, and spits out some narrative to base his claims on it. Later these narratives get to school history books and become the history as russians know it. This practice is more than hundred years old by now in USSR and later Russia.
The defeat in this context might be just being defeated by Ukraine
My point is that culture can change, being aggressive in eastern europe is not the essence of Russia just like being aggressive in central europe turned out not to be the essence of Germany.
A fascist regime promises war, victory and glory, when that collapses the regime also collapses
> But it turns out a very militarized nation can become completely pacifist after suffering a complete utter defeat, suffering and destruction.
Which was not really Germany's case. It was going to be, see the Morgenthau plan, but then the US realised they needed someone to help contain the Communists, and Germany become integrated into the wider West, not even 10 years after Hitler. Something that was willfully not allowed to Russia in the 1990s. (And thank Kohl for that, wouldn't want to be containing China!)
I see 1990s Russia more similar to Weimar Germany, a failed democracy experiment where everyone came out from wanting something else.
Regarding Germany, as opposed to 1918, defeat was not something they could escape, complete and utter destruction of cities, mass rapes, ethnic cleansing, POWs and occupation.
The strict contrast with the fascist promises of victory is the real engine of denazificatiom imo
Crimea is a special situation. I won't reiterate its complex history here since there is plenty of written here, but I'd like to point out that one could have a view where Crimea is Russian and yet decry the invasion of Ukraine as illegitimate.
If anything for practical reasons: only 7% of its population is Ukrainian. It would be very a source of continuous ethnic tensions.
Hard Russian nationalism is much more than that
Such people claim that the entirety of Ukraine is just Russia and they mock them for otherwise being Polish. This narrative is an explicit outcome of an Imperial mindset
My personal opinion is that the 2014 annexation wasn't ok but the reason wasn't that Crimea is not Russian but because I value the stability and peace produced by the idea that we shouldn't change borders through force.
But that's the reason why using this "who does Crimea _belong to_" framing of the question is misleading. You will find many people who will say Russia and yet not necessarily subscribe to the imperialistic stance that Russia is employing.
I see it differently. They won't say Ukraine because Russians see themselves as superior to Ukrainians. So anything that might imply Ukrainians might have or do something better, is out of the question. It cannot compute in their brain, because Ukrainians are "Little Russians" at best.
And that's why there is a problem with the mentality of the Russian population. Literally NONE is able to say Crimea belongs to Ukraine, NONE. And that while internationally, it is part of Ukraine.
So no, my question is not misleading. When at least some Russians would say that Crimea actually belongs to Ukraine, I might have some hope. But right now, sorry, no.
Of course many many Russians think that "Ukrainians are "Little Russians" at best." But they are easily revealed for what they are when you ask them litteraly what they think about Ukrainians and you don't have to bring up the crimean question.
I posit that the crimean question will also unnecessarily put in the same cohort all those people who do recognize the distinct culture of Ukraine and their right of self determination but also consider the past and present situation of crimea to be more nuanced.
EDIT: some Russians may recognize that Ukrainians have right to self determination but they may also recognize that today Crimea is populated by a vast majority of Russians and thus there giving that land back to Ukraine would lead to further bloodshed. And yes I have heard actual Russians having that position (I'm not Russian fwiw)
ALL Russians cheered when they annexed Crimea, and NONE of them want to give it back to Ukraine, because NONE of them believe it belongs to Ukraine, counter to international agreement.
You might think this is normal, I don't. And because of that, I don't agree with statements like "it's not the Russian people, only the Russian government".
You didn't mention any Russian that sees it differently, and you confirm everything what I say. Except for the fact that you think it's normal and I don't.
Edit: What I said above is not correct and I apologize for that. After the annexation of Crimea, there was a protest in Russia with thousands of protesters. Some prominent politicians also openly opposed it.
I assume the Russians with whom I have talked to and don't think that forceful annexation was a good thing don't count under your "NONE" description.
Perhaps it's because they are few of them (fair enough mine is just personal experience, not a poll)
Or perhaps it's because you consider everybody who believes that Crimea is now populated mostly by Russians (and thinks that giving it back now will create more trouble than solve) as people who CHEERED the annexation.
I don't think it logically follows.
But I understand your feeling since there are so many people (even outside of Russia) that literally cheer for Russia getting their empire back. Unfortunate their noise surpasses any ability to have a nuanced conversation about this.
I wished humanity headed towards a peaceful resolution of conflicts where people can seek self determination and autonomy (basque, Catalan, Kurds, Palestinians, ...) instead of resolving such issues with invasion and pandering to imperialistic visions
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of regions and countries which have been transferred to a foreign power through "international agreement". Probably even your own birthplace at one time or another in history. And those agreements almost never has anything to do with what is right or justified, or taking into account the self-determination of the population.
So I don't understand how anybody can support "international agreement" by default. I certainly don't. Regarding Crimea I don't have an opinion, because I don't live there.
Germany was split into two by "international agreement", just as an example.
I don't understand. Of course Crimea was acquired by the Russian empire by force, from other people who had it in turn acquired by force and so on. But none of those were Ukrainians.
Kruschcev transferred the crimean oblast as a symbolic gesture.
Pointing this fact out does not contradict one's desire to not have Russia acquire more territory and behave in an imperialistic manner today
By your logic if a father made love to a mother as a symbolic gesture and didn't intend to have a kid, then it's totally ok to murder the kid 40 years later. Just restoring historical justice, right?
I have a good dozen of friends from Crimea despite visiting Crimea just a few times as a little kid – thousands of young people were forced out of their homes.
The russian logic is very perverted, yet completely predictable. If you are a national minority (even if your 7% claim was true) surrounded by russians, you should leave, and all your belongings should be redistributed among russians.
But if you are a russian minority surrounded by different nations, then everyone around you should learn russian language, respect russian culture, otherwise russian tanks will come. Or maybe they won't, but only for the sake of global stability (otherwise it's justified)
Crimea is a Russian territory that was given to Ukraine by totalitarian non-elected leader Nikita Khrushev. It was a crime done by totalitarian government and Russia restored historical justice.
The only crime regarding Crimea at around that time was Tatar genocide performed by yet another non-elected leader so much beloved and supported by russians.
Beloved still today, because he made/makes them feel superior.
Reminds me a bit of another leader around that same period. He also made his countrymen feel superior. That one is not beloved today anymore, and maybe that's the reason why that population was able to transform into a normal democratic country.
As a German, I must insist that your statement is absolutely wrong. The people of a country can be your enemy. A Government like Nazi-Germany or current day Russia cannot exist without plenty of support by its people in the first place.
I don't for a moment believe that German people as a group, or Russian people as a group, or British people as a group etc. are morally superior to any of the others. If one can, through specific circumstances, end up supporting bad things, then so would the others in that circumstance.
So it doesn't matter if the Russian people is the enemy in the sense of supporting their mafia government. They're not doing anything you wouldn't have done. Condemning them is condemning yourself and does no one any good.
There were good Germans. There were also Germans that pretended not to notice and then there were bad Germans. The ones in the middle are collectively just as guilty because they allowed the bad ones to do their thing. You don't get to stand by while such stuff unfolds and then claim innocence.
Right now, inside Russia there are Russians who are putting their lives on the line to help stop this war before it consumes their country. Their the 'Good Russians'. And then there are those in the middle - and plenty who have fled abroad - who pretend this isn't their problem. But they're enabling the rest and should be rightly condemned for it.
It took Germany a generation or more to really get it (and even now, some don't get it but that seems to be a factor just about everywhere, the bad will always attempt to take root again).
The country that I'm from still hasn't properly accepted the mountain of skulls and the rivers of blood that our wealth is founded on. In that sense Germany is now ahead, but with the afd it remains to be seen whether they can maintain that lead for much longer.
I am absolutely sure that all groups of people have it in them to commit atrocities, not matter the ethnicity or nationality. But this doesn't mean that all groups of people commit them, all the time. At any given point in time, it's always only some of them - and those who don't must have the clear-headedness, the will, and the means to stop them. Once they are properly stopped, the world will roll out the red carpet to them, as the world did for my parents' generation of Germans. I am very grateful that I did not inherit their guilt, but their responsibilities.
That said, this message shows terrible ignorance:
> They're not doing anything you wouldn't have done. Condemning them is condemning yourself and does no one any good.
The first part might be very well true. My grandparents and their siblings have been mostly perpetrators and bystanders, some where tagging-along, very few were opposed and none of them openly, just in 'inner exile'. I am lucky for the 'mercy of the late birth' that saved me from having to proof many of the virtues that I hold dearly under real pressure. But not condemning the wrongs my grandparents did, and not holding oneself to higher standards than I would hold others, doesn't do any good. Are you sure you are incapable of doing things in another place and another time that would make your today's self condemn you and your actions?
I think this is backwards. Sure, condemn the evils your grandparents did. Sure, condemn the evils people in a state messed up by history did. Just don't think that it does any good in itself, because what moral authority do you have? You basically have to be a saint - someone those you speak to recognize as a moral authority, because hey, you really did some morally impressive things - for moral condemnation to have any effect. Otherwise why would they listen?
And you aren't. Or at least, we as a group aren't, compared to them as a group.
What's the foundation of your assumption that everyone who criticize anybody must be a saint themselves? Is this some literal application of the biblical "splinter in your brother's eye"?
In the end, I don't criticize Russian war criminals so that they stop being war criminals. That has nothing to do with a lack of authority, but with a lack of naïvity: that's what weapons are made for. I criticize the leadership of the West that they don't do enough to stop them. That's where we can use words, luckily.
Interesting thought. In the end, this is an ethical question: How much pressure is justified to put on the general population for supporting their leaders?
My feeling is that your perspective, likely shared by people like Bomber Harris or Netanyahu, does not match most peoples intuition nowadays.
I beg to differ. Accepting that tens of millions in Germany supported Hitler frenetically, thus declaring themselves enemies of everyone who was a Jew, a Democrat, a Citizen of any neighbouring country etc.pp., doesn’t mean that bombing cities to the ground is morally or legally justified, as long as there are other alternatives (and there have been, both for Harris, and for Netanyahu). The point really is: most Germans saw themselves as enemies of Freedom, Equality, and Peace. Both inside and outside of Germany. You cannot treat someone as a friend who’s violently proving the see you as the enemy.
It's a combination. Here in the US, a large chunk of the population supported Trump, knowing full well what kind of things he would do. And another large chunk of the population are trying to stop him.
You can't blame the population as a whole. But I suspect it's uncommon for the government to be completely disconnected from (some portion of) the population's sentiments.
> But I suspect it's uncommon for the government to be completely disconnected from (some portion of) the population's sentiments.
However, that sentiment is shaped by the media available to the citizens, and in places like Russia, that means primarily by the government itself. So it's not so clear cut what the sentiment would have been had it not been for the governments propaganda.
In a democracy, "We The People" is the sovereign. It is in the hands of the voters, and it is their responsibility to choose leaders wisely and shape their overall legal system. In democracies, the population doesn't get to use the "but its just our evil leaders" excuse. Only in other less democratic forms of government.
And yes, this means that in a democracy, the opposition's voters are screwed because they share in the responsibility, even if they were right. Why? Because they were unable to convince the majority of the wrongness of the majority vote.
Is supposed to be the sovereign/source of all legitimate authority.
But it's not as a practical matter in the US, or even in legalistic practice. Most legalistic factions in the US plainly treat the constitution itself (and/or its authors) as the source of its own authority.
> We the People of the United States [, in Order to ...,] do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
That is the literal first paragraph of the US constitution. I cannot imagine a valid legalistic argument that ignores that. When first establishing the constitution, it also didn't appear in a vacuum, the pre-existing states and confederation were already democratic for some time. So all authority/validity/legitimacy the US constitution has comes from the population, back then. And through continuing use, participation and broad acceptance until present.
And of course, as a practical matter in a representative democracy, between elections, the people do have far less of an influence. They can basically only voice their opinions, threaten to vote differently in the next election, or start a revolution. But that doesn't absolve them of their responsibility on election day.
> So all authority/validity/legitimacy the US constitution has comes from the population, back then
Exactly, back then. But those people are dead to a man. They are no longer people of the United States. Even if you count them as such, they would be extremely outnumbered by currently living people of the United States, and thus, democratically they can no longer confer any legitimate authority to the constitution. If they do confer any authority, it isn't democratic authority, because it has to be based on something else than the people.
> And through continuing use, participation and broad acceptance until present.
I think that's a pretty tenuous argument, all the time people constantly point to the constitution itself as authority for why they accept the constitution, rather than pointing to themselves as they should if they truly believed in the people's authority as opposed to gods, kings and holy texts. But even accepting that argument, at the very least you'd have to agree that if the people decided to change the constitution through means other than those the constitution propose, then that could still be perfectly democratic.
> But even accepting that argument, at the very least you'd have to agree that if the people decided to change the constitution through means other than those the constitution propose, then that could still be perfectly democratic.
Yes, of course. If the voters, or at least their democratically elected representatives, decide that a new and different constitution is necessary, that's totally fine and expected. Some more modern constitutions even point this out explicitly.
I'm baffled, this is one of the worst comments i've read on HN. It's hard to answer without using insults. Seems i'm really triggered by Blaming The Victim.
It can be both, I think? Politicians/powerful people take advantage of divisions in society, but often those divisions do exist in a fully-fledged or nascent form for them to exploit.
I've met a few Poles in my life and they were friendly, positive and inquiring, and not contemptuous, inflammatory or nationalistically prejudiced like you, so I have faith your nation and culture are ok.
> It's not just their leadership. It's the nation.
I completely disagree. I know anecdata is useless but since you are generalizing I can as well add that all Russians I met, without exception, are normal people who just want to live a normal life, not to kill. And then there is the smaller violent part that is happy to mug, beat, and kill others, including their own people. What I can agree is that Russia has quite a problem with this "pat B" of their population because of systemic issues. But generalizing it like this, on the whole nation, is just like saying that violence has gender, rich people are bad and so on.
The issue with Russians as a nation comes from the fact that they dream of their great great empire. Collapse of Soviet Union was a mistake. Their mindset is similar to MAGA in that sense. Make Russia great again.
Next time you meet a Russian again ask about what they think about Russian Empire. Or who gets to keep Crimea.
This is the nature of polarization. Of course you will find many Russians that are hard nationalists and you will also find many that prefer open societies and chances are that the likelihood of you encountering one or the other depends on your social bubble
Nations have a tipping point where the violent minority can take power if there are enough of them. "Enough" might be only 10%. So a nation with 10% violent people is violent, while a nation with 9% violent people is peaceful.
It would be very hard to notice the difference between 10% and 9% by just meeting people. You'd have to meet and evaluate 1000s to measure it accurately enough. But you sure do notice the difference as a neighboring country when the tanks roll in.
So you do sometimes have to say things about nations despite it only reflecting a statistically small difference in people.
In the last 125 years Russia has been through monarchy, liberal communism (Kerensky), dictatorial communism (Lenin, Stalin), bureaucratic communism (Khrushchev to Gorbachev), liberal capitalism, oligarchy, and now dictatorship. None of them worked very well.
Whenever there's trouble, Russia's history demands a strong leader. When one arises, the strong leader soon becomes the trouble.
The problem with that last paragraph is that through almost all those regime changes (I guess the time between the Soviet collapse and Putin's rise may have been an exception), Russia has continued a strategy of systematic displacement for accelerated "russification". Those provinces effectively do not exist, they don't have enough population that identifies with the region more than with the empire.
If you force a Tatar to somewhere close to the Chinese border he will be perceived as "Russian" by the indigenous community, and their rejection will eventually make him identify as "Russian" himself, to bond with his peer displacees from other corners of the empire, and with locals who accept the empire. The exact same mechanism works in all directions, e.g. when some of those locals are displaced to somewhere near the Finnish border. The most important weapon of the Russian empire isn't the tank or the AK-47 or hard winters or sheer distance or vast amounts of mineral resources, it's industrial scale deportation for eradication of regional identity.
Considering Western countries have kept a lot of regions of the world controlled economically and resource-wise exploiting the populations, I'd say Westerners do understand - Russia is their biggest problem
Because the ruling gang has plenty of prosperity in their lives and "us vs the rest of the world" is the only way they know to keep the other 140+ million content with the few scraps they get. The more violent attitude they keep up against the rest of the world the less violent oppression they need at home to stay in power.
The same wealth disparity does not exist in the west. Travel 100km out of Moscow and compare how people live to the same distance from Paris. Then go to the Russian Far East. It’s overtly that not been seen in the west since the 1950s and WWII reconstruction.
We are talking about two different things. You are talking about the nature of poverty. No doubt the most impoverished in Russia are much worse off than the impoverished in western countries.
I, however, am talking about the gap between the wealth of the top 1 percent and the rest of society. When you have billionaires, the gap between a billionaire and every non-billionaire is the same - merely because of the nature of the size of a billion. It is so large that comparing a billion to a million is essentially equivalent to comparing a billion to a penny.
Nations make their own Logic. The US has to control or befriend the oil producing countries to maintain the petrodollar (which really maintains the dollar, which is the lynchpin of the global economy). This leads to “wars for oil” where the US doesn’t take any oil (it just needs the country to return to the dollar market - so price their oil in dollars).
Russia is a continental state so it requires its Neighbors to be weak so they cant threaten Russia. As much as it tries to escape this logic, it can’t. Russia’s core interest is to dominate and subjugate its near abroad. It has to. It’s the only way for it to become a global power.
> It has to. It’s the only way for it to become a global power.
Unless of course doing so makes them far poorer and isolates them culturally/economically, and completely embarrasses their image of having a strong military.
What is your logic or rationale for this view? I think the contrary view is easy to argue - Russia is one of the head states in BRICS which is the largest international union in the world both by population, and which has also economically surpassed the G7 as well. And militarily they're fighting a war against an endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies being armed and funded by the entirety of NATO, Europe, and a few odd balls -- and they're winning, at a cost of < 10% GDP. What other countries could match that?
I think you mean they're obstinately continuing the invasion they thought would be over in three days. Sending an endless stream of regulars, conscripts, and prisoners against people defending their homeland with drones and secondhand cold war gear.
A million casualties for a territorial stalemate is certainly one kind of winning.
Ukraine had a standing army in the hundreds of thousands, numerous heavily fortified front cities, and a substantial chunk of highly motivated 'nationalists' within their armed forces. The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3-4 days was completely nonsensical and came from Western official sources, including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. [1] The only time it surfaced in Russian propaganda was from television personalities who were obviously being boisterous and hyperbolic. That the West would publicly release such 'enticing' rhetoric prior to the war itself is interesting.
The war also isn't a stalemate by any interpretation. In the nominal sense Russian forces are making steady progress, most recently having entered into Pokrovosk [2]. But beyond that - war is rarely, if ever, a real stalemate when there are still large scale combat operations playing out. Rather it transforms into a war of attrition, where progress becomes non-linear. Ukraine is in the midst of a severe manpower shortage, but they still have enough forces to competently hold their defensive lines. But at the point that their manpower gets stretched just beyond that point, everything will collapse rapidly. In a way it's vaguely akin to a siege, except the resource under pressure tends to be manpower instead of e.g. food or water.
> The only time [the rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3-4 days] surfaced in Russian propaganda was from television personalities who were obviously being boisterous and hyperbolic
The former commander-in-chief of Russian ground forces recently gave an interview in which he said that everyone expected Ukraine to fall within three days, due to severe intelligence mistakes regarding Ukraine that reinforced the belief that 70% of Ukrainians would welcome Russian invaders with open arms. Except: https://bsky.app/profile/wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3m7a...
It could be worth mentioning that this guy had been the commander-in-cheif from April 2012 until December 2013, did not hold any post since then and retired in 2018. Otherwise people might get an impression he had been in the military in 2022 and describes an actual state of the military instead of his opinion.
1. Manpower does not matter anymore. Drones and (soon) robots do.
2. I remember media sphere prior/at the time of invasion rather well. The general consensus was that Ukraine would fall in less than two weeks. The invasion itself started on the Fatherhood Defender's Day and I believe was supposed to be completed before the International Women's Day to make a good picture of Russian soldiers gifting flowers to Ukrainian women.
Drones have a problem. The reason they're so effective right now is because they're dirt cheap. A $10,000 drone can take out a $10,000,000 tank. And it gets into the issue of how money isn't stuff. Because that $10,000 drone isn't made of much and can be easily pumped out pretty quickly, whereas that tank involved a massive amount of supplies. Even if you have all the money in the world, this is a losing battle.
But as you try to make more sophisticated drones, to the point of aiming to fully replace men on the front, they start to become more and more expensive. You want them to be resistant to electronic warfare and you probably don't want to rely on fiber optics so you need some sort of fully autonomous processing unit on board, capable of generalized scenario processing. And you want them to be able to fly for a really long time, so you don't have to have deployment points front close to the front. And so on. You are gradually just reinventing the MQ-9 Reapers and their $30million+ price tag. And suddenly you've lost all the benefit of drones.
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Russia started peace negotiations with Ukraine 4 days after invading. If you genuinely expect complete capitulation within 2 weeks, you don't start negotiating for peace after 4 days when the enemy would be in a relative position of strength. For that matter, a lot of their early maneuvers were clearly more performative than military in style, like the endless convoys which looked imposing but served no purpose and imposed logistical issues that Russia clearly was not prepared to deal with.
In reality I think Russia did expect there was a high probability that Ukraine would rapidly agree to a settlement, and absent Western involvement that probably would have been correct. And similarly I think the US was probably expecting that Russian forces would just scatter and run at the first sight of Western arms. In reality the optimistic view of both sides ended up not panning and so everybody ended up with a much more real war than they probably expected.
Leaving the price formation nuances of some US peace-time military artifacts aside, my point is that manpower a.k.a. human soldiers become more and more obsolete and should not be treated as a main criteria perhaps already in the current Russian-Ukraine conflict.
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4 days is exactly the time frame to understand that initial calculations have gone wrong and it is time for damage control (try to pull out, initiate peace negotiations, etc).
War was, remains, and will probably always be a deadly game of logistics. Even relatively small divisions of soldiers will go through literally tons of supplies per day. And so getting the stuff to supply these soldiers is essentially what war is. It's why the Russian winter is so famous a weapon in war - it's not just literally freezing invading armies, but making logistics vastly more difficult while simultaneously imposing new requirements on those logistics. This is the reason things like cities are important in war. It's not just some abstract concept of strategic/defensive value, but because they are key points for organizing and advancing logistics. And throughout this entire process humans are the key driver of your logistics, both literally and figuratively.
Also even in terms of pure destruction and death, drones get like 99% of the media attention and analysis, yet good old fashioned artillery is still responsible for something like 80% of deaths. Drones are completely reshaping the modern battlefield, but they're working as a compliment to everything else rather than just overriding it. That might change in the distant future, but it's far from where we are today.
Well they were never aiming to occupy the entire country, the armistice negotiations were for once the decapitation attack on Kyiv succeeded they could negotiation territory annexation and a puppet government.
> The rhetoric about Ukraine falling in 3-4 days was completely nonsensical
I am basing this on the blitz attack on Kyiv, not anyone's rhetoric. I guess in your mind those paratroopers at Hostomel and armor column from Belarus were going to Amazon Prime their food, ammunition, fuel.
There's also the post-invasion rounds of conscription, recruitment from prisons, and the infamous Prigozhin videos where he tells the MoD to stop sending so much ammunition because Wagner was too well-supplied on account of a multiyear war being totally the thing that the Kremlin planned for.
> including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Who, in this conflict, have a much better reputation for calling Russia's strategy than Russia or you. And they'd probably show you the receipts if you engaged them directly.
> it transforms into a war of attrition
Okay I stopped caring, everything from here on out seems like you giving a lecture at a military academy but I have no reason to believe you know the first thing about the subject. Based on your another commentary it seems more like you are trying to make the Russian invasion seem to be proceeding normally by changing what normal is.
Pokrovsk? Great example of Russia's strategic incompetence. It was eliminated as a military asset a year ago, and they simply could have moved on. But because of fixation on toponym political victories they have continued to throw resources at it pointlessly. Pokrovsk has probably been a net win for Ukraine.
I haven't been following events too closely lately and didn't realize we were already at the [x isn't even strategically relevant] point with Pokrovsk. I'd assumed that city would hold longer. You might want to edit the Wiki - they're still accidentally calling it a strategic city.
Propaganda ate your brain if you really believe BRICS is a real alliance or that it matches, or surpasses (sic!), G7.
> And militarily they're fighting a war against an endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies
By… employing endless stream of their own meat and paying them obscene (locally) money.
Difference is that Ukraine fights for survival.
Reading your comment, I’m a bit confused about your moral compass. Would you also call Polish Armed Forces during WW2 “endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies” when they resisted numerically superior opponent?
BRICS overcame the G7 economically in 2018 with the difference growing sharply since then. [1] Currently BRICS has about 36% of the world GDP vs about 30% for G7. The world is changing far faster than most realize. Back in 2000 it was 43% for G7 vs 21% for BRICS. The world's changing a lot faster than most people realize.
As for people voluntarily fighting for a country - I think that's certainly a noble cause. Not only the cause itself, but because it exemplifies that the leaders of that country have shaped a system that people are willing to die, and kill, over. It's a validation of a society. Of course it can also be a proxy for desperation - as you mention Russian enlistment offerings are rather extremely generous, but at least it remains a system that people opt into knowing full well what it entails.
But on the other hand I find forced conscription barbaric. You are taking people who do not believe something is worth dying over, and forcing them to die, and kill, over it. I think it will be something looked upon in the future like we look upon slavery today. Is it a necessary evil? Maybe, but people argued the exact same of slavery in the past as well.
only relevant for local buyers, world economic power is still denominated in GDP, a flawed metric yet one that can’t be gamed. And G7 > BRICS by far in this
A dollar by itself is meaningless because prices people pay are not meaningfully impacted by a global market. For instance you pay 800% more for a bottle of water in the US than you do in the literal desert of Saudi Arabia. [1] So comparing dollar for dollar is meaningless.
This is likely also why G7 economies are relatively shrinking. There's less of a focus on "things" and more of a focus on gaming stuff to increase paper wealth, generally to the benefit of a very small percent of society.
BRICS isn't real. There's literally no BRICS union. These countries talk like there is, but in practice they don't do anything collaboratively. BRICS is just their propaganda tool. Empty words.
The peace treaty will clarify that, but I think the more important thing is the establishment of a multipolar world order. That, in and of itself, can lead to conflict, but I also have some optimism that it might bring in a paradoxical peace in the same way that nuclear weapons did. The reason nukes have been good is because it makes it clear that war is unwinnable which effectively ended direct conflict between world powers. Yet of course proxy wars are alive and well with Ukraine being the king of them all. And the US may be unable to defeat Russia in this war, but it's also equally unlikely that Russia could defeat the US in a similar scenario. So, "The only winning move is not to play."
Of course this says nothing at all about relatively small regional conflicts, but in the grand scheme of things I'm far more concerned about WW3 than I am about these. That's not to understate the impact of what can (and is) happening in these sort of conflicts, but at the end of the day I don't think humanity will ever 'evolve' beyond war, and so in the mean time I think the goal should be to not end our species over something that will inevitably look like a pointless waste of life in a few decades. Keep in mind that WW1 was unironically called 'The War to End All Wars' before we started attaching an ordinal to it.
> The reason nukes have been good is because it makes it clear that war is unwinnable which effectively ended direct conflict between world powers. Yet of course proxy wars are alive and well with Ukraine being the king of them all.
Not looking forward to being your proxywar or small regional conflict. It’s amazingly frustrating to be dragged into this without any provocation or possibility to actually affect the situation. Just unfortunate geography I guess.
I don’t think nukes stopped the direct conflict between world powers. They made it possible for the first time. There is no reach to US without them.
War in Europe or parts of Asia is easy the old fashioned way and seems to happen on a regular basis.
The peace treaty? What peace treaty? Multipolar world order is a buzzword that failed states like Russia certainly like to spout on their media channels to try and prove that they are not complete failures, and that in fact losing a million people to barely advance a frontline over 3 years is just and necessary. At this point they should be really worried about China just waltzing in on Siberia and taking whatever they need.
They are only doing ok because of Trump’s support for Russia. Europe badly needs to get its shit together but if the US actually engaged, it could end the war promptly.
Because then they’d have to recognise their failures. It’s like an alcoholic that keeps drinking in order to keep pushing back the reckoning of reality.
The error most people make on this front is thinking that Russia is just another country with regular country goals like any other. Grow the economy, make lives better for its people over the long term, that kind of thing. But this is not the case. Russia has been run by thugs for centuries in, centuries out, and they want thug things. Make the head thugs richer and fatter while everyone else suffers, both at home and abroad.
For individuals, a person might ask "Why can't Rodney just behave himself" without accepting that Rodney is violently anti-social and likes to throw liquidy turds at everyone. And for species, a person might ask "Why can't spider monkeys just behave themselves" without accepting that spider monkeys are dumb animals and that's what they do.
But if I point out that this same thing applies to the Russians as a whole, then suddenly I'm racist.
Do you really believe the EU would have accepted a country with easily 1/3 of the population of everyone else combined (so, a third of the seats at the "European Parliament") and a huge territory requiring investment? Or that they would have risked a Russian immigration crisis? Put themselves on China's doorstep, voluntarily? With all due respect, it's extremely naïve.
It started to expand to the east in 16th century, which was and is still cruel to indigenous people of Siberia (e..g highest level of current war participation per capita).
South/Caucasus expansion was brutal and was displayed in Russian literature.
European states suffered from Russia for centuries as well.
Is one reason that Russia is an empire, created as the same time as the British and French empires, ruling over countries with their own long histories and separate cultures that would break apart without an autocratic government?
Look at the map. It's huge. In order to maintain its territorial integrity it has to act like a super power, or it has no reason to exist in its current form.
Not to talk down Canada, but they're not geographically comparable. Russia is almost twice as large and borders 14 countries. I don't mean this as an excuse for Russian behavior, but to explain why it has internalized the idea of imperialism.
Because that wouldn't benefit Putin personally as much as the status quo? And he's the decision maker. Dictators routinely make decisions where they hurt their country to keep a much bigger slice of the pie for themselves...
A nation state's values should align with EU for them to be part of the group. I don't think Russia would ever choose to join the union considering that even UK(which is culturally closer to Europe) left it.
Many Brits immediately regretted voting for leaving after Brexit. They started educating themselves when it was to late and said they would have voted for staying had they known (instead of believing Nigel Farage). The regions that voted for leaving where the rural economically weak ones that even received money from the EU.
Russia would first have to be a "normal country". It would need an educated populace and a non-extractive (manufacturing or services) economy. It suffers from both a resource curse and Dutch disease. It is difficult to form a middle class that's independent of state institutions and employment. It has poor demographics and brain drain. It has no independent elites (academics, journalists, judges, business people), so the only restorative force in the society is brutal punishment for non-alignment with a cult of personal power.
Even if Putin wanted to join the E.U., the economy, social structures and institutions, and uneducated voting populace wouldn't allow it to be stable enough to join.
Russia at this point can't even be a successful authoritarian state like China. It's hard to say that it will never be a democracy, but those with a memory of the 1990's find that idea traumatic. Looking far forward in time, eventually global oil independence and demographic decline may force economic reform.
It's not just literacy, although that's nearly required to engage in the public discourse. It's really more like indoctrination. The voting populace has to have an implicit belief in public institutions, believe that attempting to vote or losing a vote is not cataclysmic (not a great reason for violence or retribution), and have patience that the system will gradually correct with future votes rather than require a authoritarian to restore order. I think you can also add a distaste for cults of personalities, and a willingness to vote in disagreement with religious leaders. Lastly, voters have to have a shared delusion that their vote matters, which it practically does not (economic value of voting is negative for the individual).
Russia likely doesn't meet these requirements, and the U.S. has had many failed democratic experiments in places like Afghanistan where this culture is missing.
When I think about this, I often come back to thinking that the societies that underwent some conflict or difficult times, absolutely cannot have a member of an older generation in charge, because the only thing they do is to continue that conflict, completely manufacturing it again if needed, just to get their "revenge". Current Russian attempt at genociding Ukrainians is all the more tragic in that the generations, that remember the previous hostilities, were almost all gone by now. Alas, that corner of the world is again poisoned for several generations ahead.
The majority of Russian population genuinely believes that if the country "becomes weaker", some evil Western soldiers would come and either (belief A) physically exterminate every last of them or (belief B) enslave for eternity.
From that lens, loosing a few millions in a "pre-emptive strike" to save the bulk of population looks reasonable. Don't ask me how they ended up with this picture of reality.
Russia did inquire about joining NATO multiple times, as far back as the 50s as the USSR, in the 90s after USSR collapsed, and then again by Putin in the 2000s. It was rebuffed each time.
Joining the EU would be somewhat nonsensical as they would gain very little from it and cede substantial sovereignty in exchange. It's the same reason places like Norway have no interest in joining the EU.
>Russia did inquire about joining NATO multiple times, as far back as the 50s as the USSR,
But Russia never inquired in good faith. It was only ever sarcastically. And had it joined NATO (perhaps because the west was stupid, which it is), then right now we'd be in the pickle of trying to reconcile one NATO member invading another (likely) NATO member, and wondering what to do about it. Russia doesn't honor its treaties, neither according to the spirit of the law nor to the letter.
Now that there's no longer any point in hiding it, we should expand NATO to include everyone that is marginally adjacent to Russia. Japan, South Korea, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan. Hell, why not throw Taiwan in.
Citation needed.
Stalin did at one point signal interest in joining NATO, fully aware that the proposal would be rejected; the gesture was largely ironic and intended to expose the alliance’s anti-Soviet character rather than to pursue genuine integration.
Post-Soviet Russia likewise raised the possibility of NATO membership on two occasions—first under Yeltsin and again early in Putin’s presidency. In both cases, the idea was dismissed, even as NATO proceeded to incorporate nearly all former Warsaw Pact members. This asymmetry contributed to the deterioration of Russia–NATO relations. Declassified materials from the U.S. National Archives documenting NATO–Russia talks over the years shed light on the alliance’s consistent reluctance to treat Russia as a potential partner rather than an object of containment.
That said, NATO and Russia were structurally ill-suited for integration from the outset. Russia’s geographic scale, strategic culture, and legacy military doctrine and equipment posed serious obstacles to meaningful interoperability within a U.S.-led alliance. A more stable European security order might have emerged from the creation of a new, inclusive framework after the dissolution of the USSR. Instead, Western states chose to expand and entrench NATO, a decision that effectively marginalized Russia and helped lay the groundwork for today’s confrontation.
> This asymmetry contributed to the deterioration of Russia–NATO relations.
What asymmetry are we talking about here? The Warsaw Pact disintegrated because it was held together by force by the Soviet Union and as that had ceased to exist, the Warsaw Pact had no reason to exist either (ask yourself if you think for example Poland would be in a military alliance with Russia if it could choose freely; the same for Czechoslovakia (invaded 1968-1991) and Hungary (1956)). Maybe if Russia sincerely tried to become part of the Western World, many things would look different now, buth we both know it did not.
> Western states chose to expand and entrench NATO
Well if the russians could once think about other peoples as having free agency it would help them immensely to get out of their eternal (and of course false) victim status. Why exactly do you think the Central European states jumped onto the chance to get into NATO as fast as possible? By whom are they feeling threatened? Of course since at least 2008 (Georgia) everyone knows the feeling was right and Russia will continue mass killings of their neigbours unless they meet a stronger enemy.
>and as that had ceased to exist, the Warsaw Pact had no reason to exist either
It should be mentioned that Russia's attempt at "We don't need NATO, we have our own NATO at home" (CSTO) is hilariously awful and failed to keep the peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan just recently.
The Warsaw Pact ceased to exist because it always was a joke and Russia/SU has never had any true desire or ability to protect these other countries... they merely want to discourage them in any way possible from "joining the other team".
Until Russia stops being Russia, they will always be the problem.
If you look at Yeltsin’s presidency and Putin’s first term, both pursued the goal of integrating Russia into the Western world, and to some extent they succeeded. At the same time, both leaders strongly opposed NATO’s expansion eastward. This opposition was rooted in explicit assurances given by Western governments that NATO would not expand, assurances made in exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet troops from East Germany. Putin’s stance hardened once it became clear that Russia would never be accepted into either the EU or NATO, unlike many other former Soviet states.
You speak of Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors, but overlook Western aggression toward Russia. Russia—and earlier the USSR—was invaded twice in the last century by coalitions of Western powers. Two of the most devastating wars of the twentieth century were fought largely on Russian territory, resulting in the loss of tens of millions of lives. These experiences are often downplayed or ignored in Western historiography, but they remain central to Russian historical memory.
Take Finland as an example. The USSR attacked Finland once, but Finland invaded Soviet territory twice: first by annexing land, and later by participating in mass violence alongside Nazi Germany. Yet popular memory outside Russia tends to focus almost exclusively on the Soviet attack. Given this historical context, it is hardly surprising that Russia remains deeply suspicious of NATO and Western countries—especially considering that, over the past 30 years, NATO members have been involved in numerous wars of aggression.
> If you look at Yeltsin’s presidency and Putin’s first term, both pursued the goal of integrating Russia into the Western world, and to some extent they succeeded.
They succeeded to some extent to integrate Russia into the Western world, but failed or didn't try to actually change Russia. Already in first Putin's term it becomes clear how will the country proceed.
> This opposition was rooted in explicit assurances
No such explicit assurances have ever existed and if someone claims russian politicians have believed some spoken sentences as ratified pacts, they are either dumb or lying. Anyway, Russia also promised in writing to guarantee the territorial integrity and safety of Ukraine (1994), so there is no reason to believe anything they say or write for the foreseeable future.
> You speak of Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors,
For which they never apologised.
> Yet popular memory outside Russia tends to focus almost exclusively on the Soviet attack.
For which they never apologised and annexed Karelia.
And this is exactly why many people say the only good Russian is a dead one. If the country and nation wants to be universally hated, it should proceed exactly like that.
> No such explicit assurances have ever existed and if someone claims russian politicians have believed some spoken sentences as ratified pacts, they are either dumb or lying. Anyway, Russia also promised in writing to guarantee the territorial integrity and safety of Ukraine (1994), so there is no reason to believe anything they say or write for the foreseeable future.
You can look at this issue from both sides. The Budapest Memorandum was exactly that—a memorandum—and it was never ratified by Russia. As such, it carries no more legal weight than the security assurances provided by NATO. Moreover, it was largely the Clinton administration, together with the EU, that pressured Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, since no one wanted the emergence of a new nuclear state in Europe.
> For which they never apologised.
You are also incorrect on the historical point. Russia officially apologised for the Winter War during Yeltsin’s presidency, along with issuing several other apologies for Soviet-era crimes. Finland, by contrast, has never apologised for its own actions, nor does it adequately teach about its own atrocities. Ask the average Finn how Finland acquired Petsamo or about Finland’s role in the siege of Leningrad, and you are unlikely to encounter much regret or acknowledgment of responsibility.
> And this is exactly why many people say the only good Russian is a dead one. If the country and nation wants to be universally hated, it should proceed exactly like that.
> As such, it carries no more legal weight than the security assurances provided by NATO.
There were no 'security assurances provided by NATO', but I also agree any political agreement signed or even ratified by Russia carries zero significance as they do not feel to be bound by it. They only understand force, not dialogue, and as such can't be a part of the civilised world.
> You are also incorrect on the historical point.
I am correct on that, there is no formal apology for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, for example.
> And that is just sheer racism and speech hate.
That may be, but it's also completely understandable in the face of russian behavior of the past over 100 years, of the russian public indifference to the heinous crimes perpetrated by their army in Ukraine and it is still way better and less racist and hateful that daily murdering Ukrainian children in their sleep.
(0) GP didn't mention NATO, (1) NATO exists primarily to defend against Russian aggression, so obviously they're not allowed to join, and (2) besides the incidental details added for flavor, the actual question is why Russia insists on being broadly hostile to the world rather than broadly cooperative.
The logic of 'No of course you can't join us - we're organizing to fight you!' is a good way to create a self fulfilling prophecy. Beyond that, one of the big practical reasons NATO exists is to stop its members from fighting against each other. Europe had centuries of never-ending and ever deadlier warfare eventually culminating in WW2. NATO largely stopped that by putting them under a common umbrella. Of course a practical reality is that history has shown alliances need an external enemy, or they start to turn on themselves. If the US had foreseen had powerful China would be today, I expect Russia would have been 'enlisted' into NATO.
And I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world. They cofounded BRICS which comprises near to a majority of the world's population, and also a greater share of the world's economy than e.g. the G7. Rather the "problem", and one that applies to China too, is that they will never behave in a submissive fashion to the US. They want a multipolar world, whereas the political establishment in the US still dreams of a hegemonic world order, akin to what we had after the USSR collapsed. This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict, and as the saying goes - when two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
> 'No of course you can't join us - we're organizing to fight you!'
If only this had a more complicated explanation than something akin to schoolyard drama.
> NATO largely stopped that by putting them under a common umbrella.
You're thinking of democratization, the end of imperialism, and the elimination of aggressive regimes. Helped along by the financial devastation caused by the war.
> I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world.
Sure, unless you listen to all of their broadly hostile rhetoric or are on a Malaysian or Azerbaijani airliner or something.
> This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict
This your way of saying Russia needs to cut undersea cables and invade neighbors?
> You're right, a democratic country would never do anything like that.
Can you point to the place I said this? Does the US shooting down an Iranian airliner somehow make Russia not hostile to the world? These seem like independent things.
"The world"? I don't think I've ever heard the definition of the world defined as narrowly as "80% of Europe and the US with its military allies" before.
"From 6 to 10 August [2025], Ibrahim, the Malaysian King (Yang di-Pertuan Agong), visited Russia at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin. This marked the first visit of a Malaysian head of state to Russia since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1967."
> they will never behave in a submissive fashion to the US.
What does this have to do with both of them repeatedly instigating territorial disputes with their neighbors? Granted the US certainly isn't a saint in that regard but its been quite a while since the Mexico stuff.
Annexing pieces of neighbors and defying US economic interests seem like fairly disjoint activities to me.
That’s because you misunderstand the terminology. They’re talking propaganda and “submissiveness” means something else in their language.
There’s a weird fetishism across Russia: everything is centered around gay sex. There’s no cooperation in the world, either you take it and become “petukh” (cock) or you give it and become “pakhan” (shot caller).
Matches an observation of mine that skips the prison lingo: lack of the concept of friendship without any power gradient that would make it more like a liege/vassal relation than like an alliance between equals. I wonder if that might be an echo of communism, which likely claimed all elements in the Russian language that were related to equal relations and effectively burned them for regular use?
> If the US had foreseen had powerful China would be today, I expect Russia would have been 'enlisted' into NATO.
Lol no, they would not have sabotaged their defensive alliance against a very real, belligerent, immediate enemy for the sake of defending against a potential enemy decades in the future. In any fantasy where the West has that much foresight, they have lots of better options.
Russia doesn't need to be submissive. All Russia has to do is stop starting violence with its neighbors and around the world. Don't mess with Ukraine. Don't mess with Syria. Try actually making their people's lives better instead. (I can already hear you complaining "but the US--" stop. Tu quoque is a fallacy.)
The bar is embarrassingly low. Even after they annexed Crimea, the rest of the world was willing to pretend Russia was a reasonable actor. But it wasn't enough for Russia, mostly for Putin himself I suspect.
Tu quoque can be a fallacy but in this case it demonstrates that the US not only expects, but demands, that other countries to behave in a way far and away from how it itself behaves. And that is important because it gets back to the point of the US trying to assert itself as having a position of dominance.
And also, I think many people have a rather distorted view of the world. When you say 'the rest of the world' I assume you are speaking as most do when they use this term - the Anglosphere, Europe excluding Russia/Belarus, and then the handful of oddballs like Japan and sometimes South Korea. What percent of the world do you think this is? It's less than 15%, and trending downward.
Truly sovereign nations can be expected to act in their own best interest. Russia responded to the US deciding to expand a military alliance all the way up to Ukraine, one of their most vulnerable points, exactly how the US would respond if Russia tried to form a military alliance with Mexico. I mean we brought the world to the verge of nuclear armageddon over the USSR establishing weaponry in Cuba, which doesn't even have a land route to the US!
That's why you don't do things like this, unless you're actively working to both establish and demonstrate your dominance over another country, which we were. I just don't think the moralizing angle can be argued in good faith. If you want to see 'starting shit' - we just mostly randomly invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president which is pretty lol. This moralizing angle is just disingenuous or naive.
> I mean we brought the world to the verge of nuclear armageddon over the USSR establishing weaponry in Cuba, which doesn't even have a land route to the US!
Oh I see, you really are just clueless. Do you think missiles need a "land route" to be dangerous?
You're still leaning on tu quoque too. I don't disagree that the US had behaved badly. That continues not to make Russia any smarter.
The point is that missiles are a subset of land logistics (or invasion) of which Ukraine offers both. So the US expanding into Ukraine was substantially more strategically threatening than the USSR expanding into Cuba. And the US response to Cuba was not particularly irrational, nor was Russia's to Ukraine. In the end the only way we will ever maintain a stable world order is when the giants of this world respect each other's reasonable self interest.
Oh sure, giants should respect each other's self interest, but Ukraine and it's people can get fucked as long as it's in Russia's interest. It's pathetic how you try to impugn my moral standing via US actions I don't defend, while you're the one actively pushing a morally incoherent position.
I'm not impugning your moral standing in the least. I'm saying that the moral argument you were concocting wasn't reasonable because you were implicitly expecting a great power to abide a standard which no great power ever would.
I am basing my arguments entire on realpolitik - great powers can be expected to act in their own self interest. It's consistently reliable and helps explain (and predict) things that are otherwise incomprehensible if you try listening to anybody's rhetoric. Countries do not act morally.
When a relatively weak and strategically important country tries to align itself against a giant on its doorstep, that's never going to lead to happy things for that country in the longrun. One of the countries that may be next on the chopping block for the US is Cuba, which I think makes our likely motivation behind this whole thing somewhat more clear.
Not joining, of course, but Russia did, both the people and Putin. The West had different plans, as we learned.
'From Lisbon to Vladivostok': Putin Envisions a Russia-EU Free Trade Zone - SPIEGEL ONLINE, 2010 [0]
"We propose the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok," Putin writes. "In the future, we could even consider a free trade zone or even more advanced forms of economic integration. The result would be a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of euros." [0]
the fun part is that they don't even have to join the EU - perfectly positioned and enriched by natural resources to become a northern version of a Dubai
Because they had their own union called the USSR, which collapsed due to military spending, oil price drops and centralized inneficiency. This was before Putin's mafia took over.
I think the reason Russia today is relentless anti-West is rooted the post-Soviet era in many ways characterized by (the alcoholic) Boris Yeltsin. Wikipedia gives the summary: "Yeltsin oversaw the transition of Russia's command economy into a capitalist market economy by implementing economic shock therapy, market exchange rate of the ruble, nationwide privatization, and lifting of price controls. Economic downturn, volatility, and inflation ensued. Amid the economic shift, a small number of oligarchs obtained most of the national property and wealth, while international monopolies dominated the market." and I'd add millions of people died (not an exageration).
The Putin regime began with Putin using military force to arrest any disloyal oligarchs while formulating his anti-Western ideology. But sequence of event explains why most Russians today have zero faith/interest in joining the Western World.
Russia is anti-west because traitors Gorbachev and Yeltsin (who was indeed an alcoholic) sold the country to the West for nothing, for promises that we would be treated as equals that were never kept. As you can see in many comments here (and on other sites such as Reddit this is more prominent), West consider Russian people subhumans. Something that Hitler and others said openly before, and this wave of Nazism is becoming stronger now again.
Country was destroyed, markets were destroyed, industries were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands died in ethnical conflicts, hundreds of thousands died from hunger. It was all a huge mistake and I hope we'll never repeat it.
> Country was destroyed, markets were destroyed, industries were destroyed.
And yet somehow, mysteriously, the exact same shock therapy that Russia couldn't handle produced a thriving and prosperous Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.
> for promises that we would be treated as equals that were never kept
Russia has an economy roughly the size of Benelux, and it is treated exactly as such. The problem is that the Russians have a perpetual and hilarious delusion that they're an equal to the United States. Russia can barely compete with individual US states, let alone the US itself. California alone has a larger economy than the entire Russian Federation. Texas alone has a larger economy than the entire Russian Federation.
In fact, Russia has a roughly comparable economy to Canada, which no one thinks is even remotely a power equal to the US.
Russia is treated fairly. The problem is that Russia has delusions of grandeur, so 'fairly' is not good enough. They feel slighted by being a 'mere' Canada. And instead of doing what the Chinese did, building up so their power matches their aspirations, they just awkwardly gnaw at their neighbours instead. And then they act all surprised when everyone correctly describes them as a bully and bands together for collective security.
(But of course none of Russia's behaviour is actually aimed at getting other countries to respect them, that's just a regime narrative intended to distract the Russian people from their falling living standards as Putin and his cronies rob Russia blind. The more internationally isolated Russia gets, the more indispensable Putin can pretend to be.)
There’s a Russian joke that Russia’s mission in the world is to show other countries how not to be.
Or if we get more serious: it's mix of imperial ambitions, feeling of been humiliated by west and desire of revenge, (cultural level) aggression, arrogance, ignorance and been sure that Russia is a special country with special pathway and superior culture and one of world superpowers (that been ignored and this is not "fair")
A couple of days after russia started war, on it's official news agency site was auto published article that was supposed to be victory lap (after all it was supposed to be 3 day special operation). It was promptly removed but not before it was archived. You can read decent translation here and it will show you some glimpses of what I wrote above https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t2vz4v/ria_news_ac...
For reference: I was born back in USSR and lived there till my early teen years. Been closely following russian media, discussion platforms, etc ever since.
"Benevolent" more in the sense of "currently unable to order the next massacre". The German unification only went ahead because soviet troops didn't intervene like they did in many prior instances:
Glasnost and Perestroika under Gorbachev were not benevolence but necessary because the centralized power of the Soviet Union was dwindling. The SU became more and more occupied with fixing its own problems and could no longer hold together the Eastern Bloc by influence or force. Which is why the Eastern Bloc then slowly dissolved. This didn't start with the German unification, but earlier, and encompassed Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia:
The SU (who are actually dominated by, but different from "the Russians") certainly would have liked to hold it together. And while under Yeltsin, there was a period of acceptance of the dissolution of the SU, currently Putin seems to want to revive it, at least in terms of territory.
Yes, and the three western allies agreed to let their occupation zones form a German state. Which the Soviets opposed and had their occupation zone form an East German state, thus dividing Germany at their zone boundary. The Soviets did the dividing, the other allies did no such thing.
"Against Soviet protests, the two English-speaking powers pushed for a heightened economic collaboration between the different zones, and on 1 January 1947 the British and American zones merged to form the Bizone. Over the course of 1947 and early 1948, they began to prepare the currency reform that would introduce the Deutsche Mark and ultimately lead to the creation of an independent West German state.
When the Soviets learned about these plans, they claimed that they were in violation of the Potsdam Agreement, that obviously the Western powers were not interested in further regular four-power control of Germany and that under such circumstances the Allied Control Council had no further purpose." [0]
It's a government comprised of people that weren't elected that destroys countries it supposed to govern by forcing non-rational choices that people hate but too afraid to openly criticize.
The level of life in EU is declining, while rising in Russia.
Look at any chart that shows any useful economic metric or things like life expectancy of eastern/central European countries before and after they joined the EU. It's almost to good to be true.
> The level of life in EU is declining, while rising in Russia.
That's quite easy when your GDP per capita is behind Trinidad & Tobago or even Cuba.
russians see themselves as a unique unicorn high above any other nation on the planet (because of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, and the physiological ability to drink 1L of vodka without getting sick).
> The level of life in EU is declining, while rising in Russia.
Citations, please.
> What EU can offer us? Nothing.
Right, what is clear from your messages in this thread is that Russia only sees value in other things it can take over / steal / destroy. May I ask what Russia has to offer to the rest of the world?
Many years ago I played Escape a from the Pit which was good but I played it on an iPad and eventually bounced off. Where do you recommend starting today?
My favourite in the series was Exile 3: Ruined World. It had all the elements I was talking about. I would give the 2nd remake of that one (Avernum 3: Ruined World) a try!
Did he always have this problem? I don't recall this from the early Tesla days. I have the totally subjective impression that the predictions have been getting worse and worse.
The thing seems to be that he's made the same claims since the beginning and things are always being pushed out every year .. "fully self driving taxis in 2 years"
He's the perfect salesman for giving investors hope, and delivers some things but promises everything.
The hyperloop.. Colonizing mars by 2025 I think was one claim..
That's a great summary by the rolling stone. I was thinking much earlier though around the time when Tesla was switching from the original Roadster to the first sedan and when SpaceX was really focused on landing its first rocket.
And the feeling of safety that comes with it. I left my previous employer during an acquisition and took a year off and am taking my time to find the right next gig. I cannot imagine the terror of having to find a new job, any job, ASAP because otherwise we starve and lose the house. Substantial savings are honestly much nicer than spending on a lavish lifestyle.
Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.
In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs. There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize there was an intersection with lights out and just raced through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of those cars who didn't realize it either.
> Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.
I’ve long been curious if people in S.F. who are used to Waymo “behavior” – including myself – behave differently when a Waymo is involved. For the most part, Waymos are extremely predictable and if you’re on the road as a pedestrian, cyclist, or car, are you more aggressive and willing to assert your turn in the road? Curious if Waymo has done a psychological study of how we start to think about the vehicles. I know many runners, for example, that’ll stride right into the crosswalk in front of a Waymo but wouldn’t dare to do that in front of other cars. Similarly, anecdotally people treat public transit vehicles differently than a civilian car: folks are more willing to let them drive even if out of natural turn.
Really like the idea. Unfortunately, my first upload is still spinning on one of the models about 5 minutes in. Clicking "Stop Battle" seems to do nothing either
