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Comment by surfingdino | Hacker News Reader

The thing Russians never understood after 1989 is that nobody is going to be marching on Moscow. Even Eastern European countries do not care about Russia. It is seen as a failed neighbouring state with nothing to offer. They lied to the West and used all opportunities offered to them to wage wars and weaken Western democracies instead of improving the living conditions of their own population. If you think this is all propaganda, compare the numbers of Russians migrating to the West to the numbers of Westerners migrating to Russia after 1989. Almost nobody wants to go and live there. It's a shithole. A dangerous shithole that keeps murdering people wholesale.

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It's the other way around. The US has done a lot of work to contain Russia and not allow them to develop their economy.

The only reason the Russian economy is weak is Putin. He could have easily democratized and worked with other Western nations on infrastructure and improving life for his citizens, instead he continues to subjugate, propagandize, and toss them into his military meat grinder like Stalin. He thinks the war economy will make Russia prosper, instead he’s killing off his next generation of men to improve the country. Russia has bountiful land and resources and wastes them on this crap.

We do not really care about "democracies". We just want friendly governments that are on our side. We are fine with Saudi Arabia which is the exact opposite of a democracy because they are our loyal ally.

We prefer "democracies" because we can covertly influence their elections.

Our democracy is not good either. We still hold elections on Tuesdays, an inconvenience to many. Why not on a Sunday like everyone else? We have just two political parties, no third-party candidate is ever going to get elected.

I hope “we” learned our lesson with China and Saudi Arabia. Also the (mostly) failed wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. The best you can do in a country that doesn’t adhere to principles of democracy is work with them on a limited basis. We will never, ever convince them to be democratic. That will only happen from within the country. For example there have been rumblings of revolt in Iran. Maybe we can provide access of burgeoning democracies to information and resources, but that’s about all we can do, as well as protect new ones like helping Ukraine fight the attempted genocide by Russia against the Ukrainian people. Our democracy is doing fairly well. We have a harsh polarity right now, but I think that is mostly driven by Trump and his MAGA allies. Not sure how that’s going to turn out, but I think Americans are too independently minded to watch Trump just settle in and destroy our country with concentration camps, imprisonment/elimination of his political opponents, iand military occupation of “blue”cities that he has been advertising as part of his campaign.

The next guy will be exactly the same.

Maybe, or he could be even worse, or maybe Russians will get someone who isn’t quite so bloodthirsty and delusional. It can’t be that everyone is delusional about restoring the USSR when China sitting on their backside ready to take all their resources.

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