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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

European diplomats being "strongly concerned" have long become a running joke here in Russia: https://twitter.com/ISEUConcerned

I sincerely hope that this statement finally gets backed up by some decisive action that can put real pressure on these dictators, but I don't get my hopes up.

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I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?

Is it like China yet? I'm guessing not as there's no visible list of banned words and phrases, but we don't see (in HN) much criticism of Russia, Belarus from there, just attacks on the hypocrisy of the West.

Do you see it headed towards China, where no internal criticism is allowed?

How will you know if the answer to this is honest or censored, though?

For the Chinese you can tell when they cannot even refer to, say or admit certain things: e.g. massacres. But they would say "we are not being censored"

For China and Russia, etc, it feels as if by mocking the hypocrisy of the West they are naively assuming that there's no such criticism from within the West.

I think this is revealing but I might be wrong.

> For the Chinese you can tell when they cannot even refer to, say or admit certain things: e.g. massacres. But they would say "we are not being censored"

It is exactly the same in Russia, you may not mention certain historical facts at all, e.g. Germany-USSR cooperation during 1939-1941

That's why there is a Russian language Wikipedia article about said cooperation: https://ru.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Договор_о_ненападении_между_... and that article cites a number of print books.

To be fair, that's likely neither hosted in Russia nor exclusively edited by Russian residents.

The Chinese Wikipedia has an article on the 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre, for example. I would assume it's not available in China. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%8B%E4...

Well, this is fine example of so-called "lie", plain and simple. You may mention it, and often it is being mentioned by all kinds of media. Things that really are frowned upon are highly controversial topics like alleged mass raping by the Red Army in Germany during WW2 . Other than that, no holds are barred, and things are discussed freely; I'd say hot topics are more frequent in Russian media than in the US one ; but clearly hotness and level of controversy is different in two blocs

It seems you're quibbling on which topics can't be talked about, not that there are some.

Many countries have forbidden topics. Try to question whether holocaust was real in EU.

if you're still in Russia, try posting some photos of 1939 Brest-Litovsk parade on your VK page, we'll watch from afar how it goes for you

Like this? https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Парад_вермахта_перед_частями_Р...

no, like post it to your VK and write "USSR cooperated with Nazis to divide and occupy Poland"

Alleged?

As a native Russian I do remember learning about the said cooperation in school in the 2000s

You can google my username, and get my social network accounts for the last 20 years, and a lot of details me and even my family, wikipedia article about my grandfather and his history in USSR, and so on. And then ask yourself if state propaganda would go to such trouble for a couple of comments. It's not doxing, I wouldn't use it if I wasn't completely okay with that.

It is a crime to make caricatures of Vladimir Putin.

Someone is downvoting this comment to death, so I'm sharing the story for the brave and curious.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/04/05...

It's also apparently not advisable to beat him in ice hockey.

https://deadspin.com/vladimir-putin-scores-eight-goals-in-ru...

Pikabu is one of the most popular Russian websites (something like Reddit). Here's search results of Putin caricatures: https://pikabu.ru/tag/%D0%92%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BC%D...

It might be a crime, but it's not enforced enough, obviously.

The real reason for that law is probably to use it as a tool against dissidents.

Criticism is allowed unless you have ambitions to work in government. Critique of the government has become actually quite common in the Russian stand up comedy scene. There are some exceptions, like you cannot show any public disrespect to the Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov (you can google how people apologise to him).

Edit (forgot to mention): also, participating in anti-government protests often results in people losing their jobs or being expelled from the universities

Edit 2: also, there is an ongoing crisis with the independent media: the Russian government is trying to suffocate the independent news outlets by classifying them as foreign agents (which has pretty bad practical outcomes for the news outlet)

> participating in anti-government protests often results in people losing their jobs or being expelled from the universities

This is quickly becoming the situation in the US if you criticize popular political movements.

For example, there have been many documented cases in the past few years of people getting fired over supporting the BDS movement - or in a few cases, not actively supporting anti-BDS movements.

... oh, that's not what you meant?

Not exactly... In the US, organizations use this form of self-censorship to prevent a potential backlash from the public, whereas in Russia, the bans are direct orders from the government and the employers simply don't have any choice.

Often, there is less practical difference than I’d hope for. Look at the credit card networks’ sanctions of things like allofmp3.com, for example.

If you enjoy audio fiction, or short stories you might enjoy “The Revolution, brought to you by Nike”. It was written by an ad industry insider, and touches on a lot of issues regarding corporate self-censorship. (It’s a few years old, and predates Nike’s recent political activism):

https://escapepod.org/2018/09/06/escape-pod-644-the-revoluti...

> are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?

What "associated astern european states" do you mean?

Belarus probably serves as a decent example.

Belarus aside, which ones? Because I can't think of any.

Seriously, it's been over thirty years since the end of Cold War and people still think there are some eastern European states associated with Russia... Almost all of them are in the EU now with the notable exception of Ukraine which is in a state of de facto war with Russia. Even Lukashenko has a bitter-sweet relationship with Putin.

There's still Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaidjan. Technically, the Caucasus region is still in Europe.

I've seen some consider Kazakhstan to be a part of Europe. I suspect the region stretches, depending on the speaker, far enough east to encompass the speaker's country, regardless of its location (but no further).

Kazahstan is in Central Asia probably because it's so big. Even their timezones are prefixed with Asia. The Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains are the eastern limits of Europe, so everything on the Caspian's west bank is in Europe. Astrakhan is in Europe for instance.

Of these, Georgians are as anti-Kremlin as one could be, they were at open war against Russia in 2008. Armenia is a pro-European democracy. Azerbaijan, probably the least democratic of these, doesn't long for Kremlin either. In general, all eastern-European countries were happy to become independent from Russia and there is no reason for them to choose Russia over the EU.

So one would never refer to them as "Russia and associated eastern european states" because, frankly speaking, Kremlin has no friends in Eastern Europe. (I specifically differentiate between Kremlin with its cold-blooded war crimes, and Russian people, who are normal nice folks and are a significant part of the total population of Eastern Europe.)

> I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states? Is it like China yet?

Yes, plenty of people inside those countries do not like regime and openly discuss it on public internet websites. I don't know about China situation so I can't make a direct comparison. If you're very popular blogger and you'll make direct insults to Putin (or any other person with high position), you might be fined or even jailed, there are laws prohibiting insults against people, but those cases are very rare. And nobody hunts ordinary people.

> I'm guessing not as there's no visible list of banned words and phrases, but we don't see (in HN) much criticism of Russia, Belarus from there, just attacks on the hypocrisy of the West.

Huh? HN is pretty much against Russia, Belarus, etc. Those who try to defend usually are heavily downvoted and labeled as kremlin bots.

Anyway people usually are gathered with similar viewpoints. Any outsiders are expelled quickly. I know web forums, where most of people are holding pro-Russian viewpoint and I know web forums, where most of people are holding pro-West viewpoint. But I know no webforum with balanced opinion. I think that for US people Republicans vs Democrats might be a close analogy.

> If you're very popular blogger and you'll make direct insults to Putin (or any other person with high position), you might be fined or even jailed

> nobody hunts ordinary people

Unless they have something bad to say about the regime. These don’t add up, are bloggers not ordinary people? How can you be ok with this?

> Unless they have something bad to say about the regime.

That's not true.

> are bloggers not ordinary people?

No, they're influencers.

> How can you be ok with this?

Why wouldn't I be ok with this? Nobody should be allowed to insult anyone.

> I know that people can joke about the west in Russia but are people allowed to make jokes about their own government in Russia and in the associated eastern european states?

That's a tough question. For example, when I was active in TikTok (I grew tired of it pretty fast), I've made a lot of very critical videos that had a lot of views. In one of them, that got almost 100k views, I explicitly said that Putin and his gang are usurping power, and while the current Russian laws say that it's punishable up to 20 years in prison, I think that they deserve the death penalty. I did not get in any trouble for that. But many others from Russian Libertarian Party (which I'm a member of) have, even though they've said much less. May be they had a wider reach, or may be it's just random, I don't know. And I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of years later I'll get 5 years of prison for these TikToks.

thanks for your perspective! Is the chilling factor an issue there yet? It feels from your comments that it's not, that its a bit too random yet, or a bit too early?

While criticism is legal, it does significantly increase your chances of falling out a window, if you're in a prominent position. Very careless, these Kremlin critics.

Interestingly, critics of repressive regimes exhibit _themed_ carelessness; those who were a bit too open in Apartheid South Africa fell down _stairs_, instead.

I am very worried that the situation is headed towards China, or much worse.

And the main reason I am worried is that I can see no path towards a peaceful de-escalation. It is a foregone conclusion in the West that "Russia = bad" and any attempt to say anything counter to that narrative gets you labeled a pro-Kremlin troll. Let's see how deep in the grey this comments ends up for example.

Think Germany after WW1. Humiliated, defeated country. The people of such countries tend to follow leaders who promise to make them great again. When they do, they get further mockery and isolation. And I think it's been conclusively proven that this only breeds more radicalism.

But most will read this as "if you are not with us then you are against us" and turn up the intensity.

There is this reaction in internet communities to demand a kind of reaction from a democratic organisation that would only be possible in an autocracy.

As a EU citizen, this is quite hilarious. The EU is so toothless it hurts.

Good, so you're in favour of an EU army? Armed invasion of Bielorussia to kidnap the guy back?

The geopolitical armchair experts complain more about responses than actually giving realistic suggestions to give.

(Sure, we can cut Belarus out, and see thousands of "Russian tourists" go for a holiday there right after - maybe that would be a good response?). And yes, you won't see me defending Borrell.

I agree. There is a lot of armchair whining here. Are people really in favour of an invasion of Belarus?

Why are you talking like there's no middle between not doing anything and a full on invasion?

From the top of my head:

- Divert EU planes to avoid Belarus.

- Prevent Belarus' aeroplanes from flying over the EU.

- Increase sanctions towards Belarus officials.

etc etc

Thanks, yes, these are realistic, and might be in the way of being implemented.

(Also probably will get counted as "toothless". That's kinda of my point)

Yes, and all of them take time to be put into motion. A lot of different parties will have to agree, including immoral profit-driven scum like Ryanair. That's what democracy looks like in practice; it ain't as pretty and orderly as a tyrannical dictatorship, where one guy says something and everyone complies right away.

All of that means it's early to complain about any lack of European reaction. In some areas there has been a strong response already, and it will likely get stronger in the next few weeks.

Yes, but, remember mh-17 - the plane with 200 dutch citizens that russians blasted out of the sky in 2014? I'm sure strong response from the EU is coming in any minute now.

Russia was sanctioned as part of the annexation of Crimea, of which that crime was part.

Well that's a most uncharitable characterisation of Ryanair. They are indeed profit-driven but they are unashamedly upfront and, frankly, honest about this. Their ruthless efficiency enables cheap flights across Europe, which was largely out of reach to previous generations. I'm not sure how they really differ from other successful profit-driven businesses, other than perhaps their marketing approach. You can choose not to fly with them of course, but many do, and wouldn't consider themselves immoral for doing so.

After this very incident, they continued flying over Belarus like nothing had happened. They couldn't sacrifice even a penny of profit, after one of their very own passengers had been kidnapped, to guarantee the safety of their customers. That was scummy, but absolutely in character for a business that doesn't even pretend to care about anything but their money. It took European law to make them provide the bare minimum of human comfort to their passengers.

I often have little alternative but to fly with Ryanair, as the airport in my hometown has been effectively taken over by them during a downturn. I honestly don't even experience much of the "cheapness" - for one reason or another, flying with my kids always ends up costing as much as on a regular airline. They currently owe me 600 quid for a flight I had booked pre-pandemic which obviously got cancelled - and they'd rather sit on a "voucher" for a decade rather than refund me, of course. I'm happy they changed the market a bit, but that was 30 years ago, now they're just a garden variety sociopathic business.

Friendly note: people from the country of Belarus call themselves "Belarusians" (pronounced like "bela-roo-sians", not like "bela-russians"), and take offence at the term "Bielorussia".

This might be a simple mistranslation; in many Romance languages, Belarus is called 'Bielorussia'.

Noted and fixed, as the other commenter noted it was the wrong language (and yes the romance languages call it something like Bielorussia, not much that can be done about that, sorry)

That's interesting! From my (admittedly very weak) understanding of Cyrillic, I'd expect Беларусь to be pronounced with a "y" sound as part of the "e", similarly to the vowel at the start of Ельцин (Yeltsin).

Presumably that's because of a lack of orthographic knowledge on my part... or is it something more subtle (say, the belorusian language differing from Russian)? I have a vague memory of languages in the former Yugoslavia being either "ekavsky" or "ijekavsky".

Couldn't agree more. The pattern is basically:

1. High-ranking official says they're "gravely/deeply/very concerned" within the first 24-48h.

2. Some EU parliament member mentions the problem within two or three weeks, shaming other members. A clip of this few minutes long speech gets shared all over social media.

3. Absolutely nothing happens until everyone forgets about the issue.

Over and over again, issue after issue, day after day.

Is this better or worse than the US pattern of sanctions and drone strikes?

Would you prefer a strong, centralised EU government with a strong leader (aka dictator)?

Well, I don't.

But this is the only way to take direct action - as the individual members are not of a single mind.

"centralised EU government with a strong leader (aka dictator)?"

Those are the only two options? Like how you can either have people dying because they cant afford a surgery, or you become EUSSR?

Democracies can be capable of quick direct action too. See U.S. esp. U.S. some 50-70 years back. Democracy is no excuse for being inefficient, if democracies don't find a way to protect their values and interests, they will eventually be replaced by more efficient states

I was just explaining to my children that there was a time when the USA government employed censors (an actual job title) to control television content.

Much that the USA was or did 50-70 years ago was decidedly not democratic and not their proudest moment.

Ah yes, the glory days of "quick direct action" in Vietnam and Cambodia. What fun was had by everyone! What progress was achieved! We should totally long for that.

These are examples of unsuccessful wars, although we don't know how many times the possibility of American intervention prevented USSR from starting theirs. Korean war was partially successful though, the whole Korea could look like North Korea if US didn't intervene

I think the US has demonstrated enough "possibility of intervention" since 1991, wouldn't you agree...? Kuwait is "free" but Iraq is lost to Iran, Afghanistan and Rwanda are still a mess.

Guns don't solve everything.

I would consider intervention in Yugoslavia pretty successful actually, instead of genocidal nationalist dictatorship we have a couple of democracies - not without their problems, but still no comparison to Milosevic regime.

Interventions in Iraq, Lybia and Syria can be seen as failures if we consider the bold goal to bring democracy to the Middle East. But at least these countries don't attack other countries any more - ISIS as evil as it is can't cause as much harm as these could.

In any case I guess with Eastern Europe it's more likely to work like it did in Yugoslavia than in Middle East. Belarus has really strong civil society, all they are missing is really some guns.

Yugoslavia was screwed up in the first place by foreign countries sponsoring separatists in Slovenia and Croatia. When that predictably turned out to be a terrible idea, “we” then decided to solve it with bombs, and while doing it we came pretty close to massive escalation with the Russians. We barely mopped up a mess of “our” own making, and it’s still a mess down South. “Successful” is not a word I would use.

Lybia is more of a mess than under Qaddafi, which means the issues with migration to Europe have worsened and the Lybians themselves are worse than they were. Same for Iraq. I won’t get into Syria since that wasn’t really a straight military intervention.

Yea, what Belarus really needs now is a good civil war, so that Putin can annex more territory on one side and we can create a new border that will be forever disputed. Or, as alternative, we can have them be the casus belli for thermonuclear war between NATO and Russia, that will work great.

Or you know, we can wait. Worst case scenario, Lukashenko sooner or later will die. Best case, enough of his security apparatus will decide he’s not worth propping up anymore. Either way, no guns required.

Sometimes it's the slow and steady diplomacy that affects the biggest change over time.

What good is quick action going to do?

It might be better to let this guide trading policies in the future.

for the guy that's being detained (or worse) right now every minute kind of counts

It's cold, but in the long run one person probably doesn't matter that much.

No offense to Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but he probably wasn't worth trouble :)

The difference here is the European politicians will be scared shitless if they fly over a country where they think they might get arrested.

Politicians scare easily and will protect themselves. If journalists can be arrested so can politicians.

That's because EU is too expanded to be able to reach consensus. Individual countries are taking action however

Can individual countries yank airport landing slots? That would get attention.

This is where professional politicians need to learn a lesson from the Great Orange One. If Buttigieg had just answered "No, I don't think our passenger planes are safe over Bellarus anymore, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to protect the safety of US citizens flying in Europe", that would have been fine.

Considering the recent revelations that Russia is literally blowing shit up in NATO countries (Bulgaria, Czechia) and EU and NATO's lack of response, this will most likely not result in any meaningful reaction either.

What is the probability of this account being owned by Russian government?

I would say 99% and you’re just perpetuating the same propaganda.

No, much smaller. I would agree that the EU's foreign policy is a disaster because of traditionally corrupted elites. The fact that the russian elites are even more corrupted is not an excuse.

EU doesn’t have a joint foregin policy. Foregin relations is still an intergovernmental matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Representative_of_the_Uni...

Yeah, the HR role has been systematically sabotaged since its inception, by way of appointing weaker and weaker nominees and starving it of any real power. At the moment it's a glorified PR position, with no decisional power whatsoever. Javier Solana effectively lost the battle for being the EU "foreign minister" and since then it's all been about individual member states.

Chances are this will not change until there is a serious rethinking of the European role in NATO. As long as the big decisions are taken there, there is no real role for an EU "ministry" beyond trade interests.

„The Common Foreign and Security Policy […] deals only with a specific part of the EU's external relations, which domains include mainly Trade and Commercial Policy and other areas such as funding to third countries, etc”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Foreign_and_Security_Po...

This is a random result when you search for Borrell in Moscow. Look for his behavior in Turkey if you want some more examples of how random this guy is while he is considered an EU representative. His position requires for him to coordinate responses of the 27, but he is just wandering around wasting time and resources. As far as the EU is an economic powerhouse, letting dictators do whatever they want while allowed access to the market is making him irrelevant.

https://www.euractiv.com/section/global-europe/news/borrell-...

Some EU member states (Hungary, Poland) are very much against handing over any diplomatic power to the High Representative. Hungarian government is basically acting as a Putin proxy here and Polish ruling party feeds on constant conflict.

I agree. At the same time Borrell has enough independence to make him a distinct face. He decides where he goals, what to say, how to behave when the EU is being mocked. Even if you say that he is just a glorified PR, he is an awful PR.

It looks that I'm picking on him, but he is just a very good example. I can talk a lot about others, but this thread is politicized enough already.

No, they're not a Putin proxy. What they're doing is literally pissing against the wind. A recent example: Hungary has bought vaccines from Russia and China which are not approved by the EMA. Now their recipients are basically not recognised as vaccinated and will face travel issues.

The HR post is a bit of an in-joke in European circles. It's being given to 2nd-rate European politicians who like to travel, and has zero effective power. The hard decisions are all taken among NATO members and are then ratified in the European Council.

Sadly this is one of the current issues of the EU project, nation-states flatly refuse to hand over anything related to defense. It's a great victory for the US.

as it should be, the EU states act collectively at most trough NATO and the current decade EU so focused on being the political voice of its members is something being tacked on against the initial premise by which its members came together; the EU should always had been an economic union first to combat the tremendous advantage of the internal market that both USA and China enjoy and nothing more.

Why would a russian troll argue for stronger action agains russian allies?

An excerpt from HN rules:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Click on my username and go through my latest comments. If I'm a Russian propaganda troll, I must be a really elaborate one.

Golergka has been here longer than you and has a much larger online footprint than you do. The chances of you being a propaganda account are larger than theirs. Besides the obvious rule violation I think you should probably apologize. Flagging this comment.

You can't attack another user like that, and we ban accounts that do. Please read the site guidelines and stick to the rules from now on. Note this one:

"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I've posted endlessly for many years about how the overwhelming majority of such accusations are based on nothing but fantasy—poisonous fantasy, which it is not ok to pollute the threads with, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. No more of this please, regardless of political orientation or ideology or nation.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

It has been a joke outside of Russia, also... I share your hope.

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