"The number of Russians born in April 2022 was no higher than it had been in the months of Hitler’s occupation."
Archive link: https://archive.is/NUvxg
Archive link: https://archive.is/NUvxg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-r7z0lM5_k&t=42s
Interestingly, he predicted the Ukraine war 5 years before it happened:
But isnt the war ongoing since 2014?
Also the shrug at 2014 wasn't unprecedented. The world also shrugged when Russia invaded Georgia 6 years before that in 2008.
What does this have to do with the point that the US and EU did in fact essentially shrug at the 2014 invasion of Ukraine? Are you disagreeing with that?
If we make excuses, that aggressive wars of conquest to expand borders and subjugate people is sometimes OK - inevitably leads to "the world does not deserve peace".
It really is throw the baby out with the bathwater, because the document everyone agreed to while bodies were still rotting, says aggression must be stopped so it doesn't spread.
Apparently the past does not effectively speak to the present, that people still think its OK to negotiate with tyranny. Cutting a deal that involves giving up on millions of people just to save your own skin is what damns humanity, and should damn it, straight to hell.
Humans volunteering other humans are scum. It's unconscionable to me the degree of apathy involved. The willingness to try to bribe tyranny with other people's land, lives, their fucking children.
The potentially fatal flaw of the UN charter isn't the obligation of all members to stop any aggression. It was never even slightly imagined that a founding member, and permanent member of the Security Council, would conduct a war of conquest. And so now the Security Council is rendered useless.
Poland has an article 51 right to aid Ukraine in collective defense. They can send ground troops. They can send and launch long range weapons. Moscow is a legitimate military target.
We are here because of every inaction that came before.
[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n10/edward-luttwak/not-u...
The 1990s were a lost generation for Russia, and then talented young engineers that came of age in the 2000s and 2010s largely went into more lucrative software jobs. Many emigrated to the West; I work with a number of them. The folks who can keep all the old military hardware running (let alone develop new ones) are getting increasingly old, and won't be around much longer.
Poland has been in NATO for a while now; non-starter unless he wanted WW3. And those would be NATO regulars in the mix, not kelptocrats in NATO hand-me-downs.
The resolution and unity displayed by NATO members surprised everybody, even the NATO members themselves
The over simplification of the Ukrainian situation is unreal, it's like we all collectively forgot the last 8-9 years of open civil war.
This guy seems unusual however, probably one of the few used as plausible deniability to prove he doesn't exclusively have right wing conspiracy theorists on, to keep the Spotify money flowing.
I actually bought one of Peter's books and found it quite enlightening at the time, but then found out that some of it didn't quite like up with reality and he seemed unwilling to adjust some of those view points.
Stalin did the same, by the way: he loved to displace populations, especially of conquered or rebellious areas, and replace them with Russians. Crimean Tatars, for example, were moved to Siberia so he could Russify Crimea.
In grander scheme, I believe that to be among the among main reasons why Russia invaded Ukraine. Free, prosperous Ukraine would've become an alternative power center in the Russian-speaking world. Imagine if Ukraine had followed Poland post-1991 and had the same median wage nowadays, double the median wage in Russia, with free access to Western markets. That would simply drain Russia from talent, and undermine Putin's legitimacy and the power of all who surround him.
What would've been the reason to live or start a business in Russia if you could move to a country with very similar culture, do the same job, and earn multiples of what your potential in Russia would be capped to? All while enjoying better security in all aspects: economomic safety, personal safety from harm, rule of law, etc.
My mother hosted a Kazakh refugee family for a year. They were from a cossack family (the father) and from a Tatar family (the mother). That day I learn that cossacks were more of a nomad ethnical group from Ukrainian plains than a military unit in Civ :)
Hitler didn’t invade/occupy Russia but the Soviet Union, but that fact notwithstanding, Operation Barbarossa launched in June of 1941 and the Germans weren’t pushed out of Stalingrad until February of 1943.
It can be expected that there was data/census about birthrate in those years during the Nazi invasion.
Individual republics had a carefully measured dose of national identity in school curricula, local TV and journals.
The economy was centrally planned and managed from Moscow.
Calling it "a union" may be a bit misleading for people who don't know Russia's history. The countries in USSR were formerly (before the Bolschevik revolution) territories of the Russian Empire, which were conquered by Russia and then mostly held against people's will.
The Soviet Republics, created after the Revolution, were artificial creations, as they were completely powerless (all power was coming exclusively from Moscow). They were created to sell the international public opinion on the idea of USSR being the universal "worker's republic", containing many nations, which will soon be joined by Soviet republics of Poland, Germany, France etc.
Legal status matters, even when it is a facade. Another example: even though power was very centralized in Mussolini's hands in Italy, Italy was still a monarchy and the king could depose Mussolini in 1943.
Also, the fact that power was very centralized, does not change the fact that countries still operated autonomously and there's no reason to believe censuses would not be counted differently in the different republics.
You seem to be really straining to split hairs here.
Russia was part of the USSR as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic [0].
In any case, people in the West commonly referred to the USSR colloquially as simply "Russia." Example: Churchill famously said in October 1939 (just after Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland) that "I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest." [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Soviet_Federative_Soci...
[1] https://www.shmoop.com/quotes/riddle-wrapped-mystery-inside-...
I also find it fascinating that I’m downvoted for making a point that I myself concede, and that the rest is simply ignored. My real question was: what “months” are being referred to here?