Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by buildsjets | Hacker News Reader

Full thread

buildsjets

[flagged]

View on HN

The Russians / USSR have shot down six passenger aircraft resulting in partial or total loss of life.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroflot_Flight_902

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_902

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 (Killing US rep Larry McDonald.)

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberia_Airlines_Flight_1812 (Purported that Russians coerced Ukraine to take the blame.)

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijan_Airlines_Flight_824...

>Purported that Russians coerced Ukraine to take the blame.

Now that was funny.

I think a fundamental part of the reasons that Russia and the West cannot seem to escape a death-march to war is that Russia is so often conflated with the USSR. They are ideologically and politically distinct entities, even as much as some in the current state of Russia might wish for the old days.

Russia legally declared itself a successor to USSR, took the UN seat, nuclear weapons, assumed debt and foreign assets, kept contacts with former communist allies like Cuba, so it’s not completely wrong. The topic of admission of Russia to NATO demonstrates this very well: Putin thought that Moscow is peer to Washington D.C. and needed special invitation (as if USSR resolved hostilities and wanted to partner with the Western bloc). NATO was treating him like any other country in Eastern Europe: apply and we will think about it — didn’t even bother to formally invite (IIRC Stoltenberg basically said in one of the interviews that even if the door was closed, the doorbell was working).

Interesting, I did not know Russia assumed almost all of the USSR debt

https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10nnw9s/comm...

Conflated? Russia literally declared itself the successor state of the USSR and assumed the latter's position on the UN Security Council.

It is not that Russia is USSR, it is that USSR was Russia + colonized, enslaved nations, like Russian Empire before it.

The evil of USSR did was because Russia was in charge.

There was never such a thing as a Russian state that didn't include colonized neighbors.

Even if you unwind all the way to the Grand Duchy of Moscow, we'd have to talk about Kazan etc.

How about Novgorod, which was a member of the Hanseatic Union back in the day, among other things?

I think this is highly debatable, as even the European part of Russia hosted no less than dozens of different ethnicities. What you say makes little sense in the context of Russian and generally eastern European history.

I‘d reserve the word „colony“ for its original meaning. USSR was a dictatorship, but not a colonial state. As a matter of fact it even prioritized the reduction of inequality between the republics of the union for several decades.

I‘d reserve the word „colony“ for its original meaning.

Which per Wikipedia is simply:

   A colony is a territory subject to a form of foreign rule.

And which was a perfectly reasonable description of the situation in all the peripheral republics, as well as many constituent parts of the RSFSR itself.

The fact that it might have also provided subsidies to some of the republics at various times (when not withholding food and/or engaging in massive, violent repressive actions against them) is entirely irrelevant to this definition. Recall that the Western colonial powers always bragged about all the infrastructure they built in their colonies, and South Africa always tried to point out the subsidies it provided its Bantustans, etc.

It is not a reasonable description, because there was no „foreign“ rule in USSR. E.g. Russia was not ruling over Ukraine, both were equal parts of the union and both Russian and Ukrainian republican governments were subjects to the rule of the communist party and union government. Same as Germany not being a colony of EU or contemporary Australia not being a colony of the Commonwealth. Russian colonial empire has fallen in 1917-1922 during the civil war.

Now this is gonna shock you, but USSR is Russia.

Russia created the USSR as a legal framework to exert power over its neighbors. This was engineered by Stalin himself.

The most important feature of Russian culture is the sentiment that Russia is great but the world is conspiring to put it down. That's 100% the same in present day Russia as it was in the USSR. They're the same.

> Russia and the West cannot seem to escape a death-march to war is that Russia is so often conflated with the USSR.

Do you think that invading your neighbours might be a contributing factor? We are in a thread about Russia shooting down an airliner, again. It’s pretty amazing to claim equal culpability here.

IMHO, Polish president plane should be counted too. It looks like pilots were tricked by Russians to descent to 50 meters instead of safe 100 meters.

Both of those altitudes seem extremely low. I’m not familiar with this incident, can you provide more details?

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

If you read this long, allegedly well researched piece:

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/all-the-presidents-men-t...

tl;dr:

"Amid the endless political struggle, it is easy to lose perspective on the Smolensk Air Disaster as, first and foremost, a plane crash. Had the President not been on board to politicize the tragedy, it would have been obvious to everyone that the flight that day was a disaster waiting to happen. A poorly trained and unqualified crew was charged with flying VIPs into an ill-equipped, decrepit airport amid extremely dense fog."

This phrase should not replace a proper plane crash investigation, isn't?

The facts are:

1) Russians fixed the airfield infrastructure in few hours AFTER the crash. https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plik:Tu-154-crash-in-smolensk-...

2) Russians directed Polish pilots to descend to 50 meters, as witnessed by Polish pilot Remigiusz Muś, who died after that.

3) Russians cut 16 seconds from the audio record, then provided the full version. ;-)

Yeah, it looks like a regular day in Russia, but Polish president died.

  “The plane was staying overnight in a hotel, as is often the case for large passenger aircraft relaxing between shifts,” the Kremlin spokesperson said.

  “Unfortunately it had a few drinks, the window was open, and it fell out. Our thoughts are with the victims”.

This is strongly politicized in Poland, there have been many commissions and expertises, and despite most Poles thinking all the worst about Russia - majority (me included) does not believe it to be on purpose.

From the Korean air incident: "As a result of the incident...President Ronald Reagan issued a directive making American satellite-based radio navigation Global Positioning System freely available for civilian use, once it was sufficiently developed, as a common good."

Americans [1][2] and pilots [3][4][5] are not that far behind, though.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion_Air_Flight_610

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Airlines_Flight_302

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_370

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Eastern_Airlines_Flight_...

Huh? You're comparing engineering failures to firing missiles at civilians?

That's kind of the point of the article isn't it? Comparing different causes of passenger deaths?

Russian missiles -> "Americans" is not apples to apples.

Once Russia figures out how to produce passenger jets we can compare them directly.

All a matter of perspective. Those "engineering failures" were in fact a case of criminal negligence which, by the way, none of the actually responsible people has gone to jail for. As for "firing missiles at civilians", this latest incident reportedly happened to a rerouted plane, in airspace that was being actively contested by enemy drones at that time. Not saying that this isn't a tragedy, or that the Russian military is not to blame, but there are also lots of blanket allegations and generalizations thrown around in this thread, that just seem out of place in a supposedly discerning and intelligent community.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com