Russia is not a modern enemy. Really. It's bullshit rhetoric parroted by the media and citizens who don't know much about the country. My wife is Russian and while there is a lot of poverty it's a great country.
When Fancy Bear will stop putting their greasy fingers everywhere for no reason, maybe i will stop the "bullshit rhetoric parroted by the media and citizens who don't know much about the country". Until then, sorry but to me tehy will be an enemy.
I also happen to have a friend who live in Kiev since 2012 and is now in the "priate security" business . "lot of poverty" is quite nicely put. When a state (city in this case, but well, no one is fooled) is hiring mercenaries from private companies to keep people in order, yeah, seems like a great country.
Volgograd, St-petersbourg and Moscow are fine, sure, but border cities?
Stick to complaining about the murders.
So without realizing it, you are actually agreeing with something Russians have been saying for a while now: that the two sides of the standoff in Ukraine are not "freedom fighters" and "evil Russian henchmen" but rather two oligarch clans.
I the average Russian (or eastern european in general) has more common ground with the average American than the average Frenchman or Italian does. That doesn't mean we can get along though.
Russia got the message and are now dutifully playing its role.
Around 2000 they wanted to become part of Nato, but this all changed with the Iraq war. The Afghanistan, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria wars later followed further dividing the two powers.
Besides states don’t have friends, only threats. Nothing to do with girlfriends, friends or people. Just the nature of states
Those countries which joined NATO ended up being vindicated when they saw what happened to Georgia and Ukraine.
This was widely confirmed by both US 3-letter agencies (generally dominated by republicans) and the private sector at the time.
While the voting machines themselves may have avoided foreign interference, other infrastructure around the voting process may well have been compromised. For example consider this article from last year[0]:
> Florida incurred an election-related security breach in 2016 that could have resulted in voter data being altered, Sen. Marco Rubio said Friday. ... Hackers were “in a position” to change voter roll data but apparently did not, Mr. Rubio told The New York Times.
If we can take Mr. Rubio's word for it, the Russian hackers went to all that trouble and then decided not to act to change the result of the election, but perhaps they found that the voter rolls had already been subject to so much partisan tampering that any more manipulation would risk backfiring.
[0] https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/27/marco-rubio...
What Twitter should be considered is irrelevant to the fact that Russia assumes itself at war with United States.
I do not know if "Russia assumes itself at war with United States" or if the US assumes itself at war with literally everyone else (they were even caught spying on their own european "allies").
Either way, Putin is Yeltsin's creature. He has no reason to be disappointed with 1996 election outcome.
First, geopolitical. Putin feels threatened by NATO. I suspect he remembers World War II, how the Germans launched an invasion from the middle of Poland and nearly broke the USSR. He fears NATO being nearer than that. But he can't seem to stop meddling in places like the Ukraine and Georgia, so many of the former Warsaw Pact (and even USSR) countries flee to NATO for protection. This puts NATO closer to him, so he fears more and wants to meddle more to make the remaining non-NATO countries more closely tied to Russia. And so it goes.
Second, political legitimacy. Putin hates real democracy, anywhere. I suspect that the issue is that parts of his population resent his sham democracy (the "vertical of power") and want a real one (and a free, honest press). Putin therefore wants to destroy or at least discredit democracy. That's the point of his disinformation campaign. It's not just to get Trump elected (though he's in favor of people who are friendly to him). Mainly he wants US democracy to look bad rather than like a shining example to the Russian people.