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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

>Where's Russia in this mix? Russia has been meddling with European affairs for hundreds of years.

More so than Britain, France, Austro-Hungary, Germany and so on meddled on European (and Russian) affairs?

Russia, for one, was twice invaded by European armies, with huge human toll.

Beyond that, Russia is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It was USSR that had a lot of power internationally (and that only because of WWII and its aftermath, it was quite unstable before that, and again after the 70s).

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For one, Soviet Russia together with the German Reich sliced Europe in two parts on the map and then invaded Poland together with Germany.

After that one mad dictator was faster than the other.

As they say, get your facts straight ;)

29 September 1938 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement

23 August 1939 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E2%80%93Ribbentrop_Pac...

So? The parent was about the victimization of Russia. Your time line is about the allies caved in to the Reich and Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and as far as I can see has nothing to do with Russia, but I might miss something.

Then the Reich and Soviet Russia sat together cut Europe in halt. Stalin was by far the better strategist though, he talked to the French and English, waited until the Reich invaded Poland and then invaded Poland and the Baltic states second.

> Russia is insignificant

You must be very naive. I do not say that in an adversarial way, but because Russia always has been (and will likely continue to be) a major world power. It is the world's largest country, with a population of roughly one-hundred-fifty million. More importantly, Russia is, along with America, one of two potentially autarchic nations. They are the only two who can not only grow food but mine their own metal, drill their own oil, etc. without importing (at least, conceivably). Isolation would of course slow either significantly, but not halt.

Consider the pressure that was on the Soviet Union, consider the inherent instability of communism, and then reconsider how long it bore up under that pressure. Russia is and has always been remarkably stable under strong, authoritarian rule (i.e. Stalin, Ivan, etc.), and any nation in a similar situation would have collapsed much sooner.

Russia is not a world power economically or population-wise. And being a world power militarily without having the other two is probably not sustainable in the long run.

Russia isn't really a global power. It's regional, and its global reach is only based on whatever legacy assets they held onto after the Soviet Union collapsed.

ICBM's mostly.

>You must be very naive.

Yeah, either that or well studied.

Russia is not a global player, it's a regional player. USSR only had global reach (e.g. to Latin America or Africa) through the communism ideology, and even that was little.

Economy wise, Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's or Canada's...

It just makes for a nice scapegoat (e.g. when losing elections), a nice Hollywood bad-guy store, and a hefty regional adversary (that sanctions etc try to constrain so that its regional influence dies and its assets are plundered by the highest bidders).

I would say that any power with nukes is not a regional player, considering they can blow up the whole planet. Russia also has significant influence in the middle east.

>I would say that any power with nukes is not a regional player, considering they can blow up the whole planet.

Well, any power with nukes doesn't want to use them and be obliterated in return. Their advantage is you can't be arbitrarily invaded and pushed over whenever some power feels like it when you have them...

Like South Africa in the 1980s or whenever they had nukes? Or possibly North Korea now?

It seems reasonable to classify a country as a regional power while still having nuclear weapons.

Just because you could wreck the world doesn't really mean that you can get anyone else to do what you want.

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