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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

European countries were super naive to what Russia is becoming. Or rather more plausibly, willingly not looking there, because money.

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Yep. The liekly difference is that it may work between democratic countries that don't want to wage war between each other, but likely not with militaristic dictatorship, that wants to wage a war (since lowering the standards of living for the subjects is mostly a problem only in democracies, because people elect the leadership).

Relationships go both ways, and so far it looks like neither side has a reason to sever them quickly, despite the war (Russia wants the money, democratic governments want to be elected next time). Severing is very gradual allowing for gradual adjustment on both sides. No huge shock. No huge deterrent.

And I don't get the purpose of the interdependency in case of direct attack either, with the attacker being the supplier. Attacking country cutting you off from significant portion of fossil fuels before the attack, will not make your defense any easier.

Just think about all those EU politicians that are in business with Russian companies or are rumored to be paid by Russia. I never understood why the USA didn't find ways to finance all European political parties after 1989 instead of letting them go around looking for money (politics has costs, no shame) with some of them ending up in Moscow or Beijing.

I think that difference is that USA was not actually that deeply interested in secretly running whole of Europe. Meanwhile, Russia was deeply interested in doing so last two decades.

America's influence in Europe is much stronger than Russia's. Besides NATO, the US has set up all kinds of NGOs that are very influential, such as the Atlantic Council and the German Marshall Fund. When that soft power doesn't work, the US is not afraid to use sanctions to coerce European countries: see US sanctions against Germany over Nordstream II, or unilateral US sanctions that prevent European companies from doing business in Iran.

It would be great if US or someone managed to prevent Nordstream II back then. Eventually they did not. And still, US dont go into outrage threatening local admins when someone wants to rename the street (as happened with Russia). They dont engage in that much corruption of officials either.

> Besides NATO

NATO is not secretly running Europe. It is alliance European countries openly begged, pressured and asked to get in.

I think everyone knows who the dominant country in NATO is. This organization alone gives the US vastly more influence in Europe than Russia wields.

> US dont go into outrage threatening local admins

You should read a bit about how ambassador Richard Grenell behaved himself in Germany. The day after he arrived, he demanded that all German companies doing business in Iran wind down their operations. And the thing is, everyone knew that that demand was backed up by real power, because the US can and does go after European companies that do business in Iran. Grenell seemed to think he was some sort of proconsul, rather than an ambassador to a friendly nation.

Russia's influence consists mainly of its gas and oil deliveries, and the fact that various European companies have invested in Russia. It has comparatively little soft power. Outside of Hungary, Serbia and a few other small European countries, the media, politics and public opinion are fairly strongly anti-Russian.

Just to give you a flavor of how much soft power the US has, the largest private news media empire in Germany, the Axel Springer group (they own the largest tabloid and one of the largest newspapers), was literally funded by the CIA during the Cold War, and still officially lists support for the United States as one of its guiding editorial principles. Meanwhile, Russia's attempts to build up pro-Russian media have gone nowhere. You can't even access RT in a lot of Europe: its YouTube channel is blocked, and DNS servers don't even return results when you query RT.

And they were very interested in doing so before that. Communist parties across the world received a lot of their funding from the USSR.

I know. That stream of money got smaller or run dry. But new parties are born all the time in Europe. Some of them manage to run countries after not so many years. They need money to run their campaigns and they end up doing the best interests of their sponsors. You can see country by country who wants to really help Ukraine and who is dragging their feet even inside some government coalitions.

Western shills for Russia were super naive to what Russia became, I am old enough to remember March 2022

"You dont understand you are just believing the MSM NATO globalist propaganda; Putin isnt a mad man and there there is no way he will invade the Ukraine, the troops are just doing exercises on the border."

Oh, they knew. They were just being casually traitorous.

I don't think I'm a "Russian shill", but honestly I was sceptical about suggestions that Russia would launch a wholesale invasion of Ukraine until it actually happened. I thought Putin was just bluffing and sabre-rattling. Given how the war has been going for Russia, I suspect Putin now wishes that people like me had been right.

You are not someone expected to look at what is happening in foreign country. As in, you are not expected to read their journals, you are not expected to follow detailed news about what is happening there. You are not expected to have detailed knowledge of what that country does abroad either.

When we talk about people who actively tried to sway public opinion or actively tried to influence politics, the expectations are different.

>"When we talk about people who actively tried to sway public opinion or actively tried to influence politics, the expectations are different."

Often utterly false. Long history of involvement in Middle East and Indochina affairs for example looks like those figureheads have cotton candy in for a brain.

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