I will never understand why it has to be this way and Russia cannot be a normal country that has the goal to join the EU and be prosperous instead of doing nonsense for over a hundred years now.
These things can and do change.
Arguably it was actually Robespierre losing is head that had to happen to stop the madness (Terror) in France, or at least create the conditions for it to stop eventually.
I don't know what has to happen in Russia. It is possible for autocratic states, that have always been autocratic, to transition to liberal democracy. It did happen in France, but even after the end of the Terror it still went through a long phase of imperial autocracy. It takes time to develop institutions strong enough to resist autocracy.
“Russian liberalism stops at the border of Ukraine”
Think about what war really is, it’s almost always a bunch of powerful people who have a disagreement with a bunch of other powerful people, who then have to trick a bunch of less powerful people to fight on their behalf. If you feel like fighting you’ve been tricked. When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die.
The government for all of the reasons you say.
The people because they have fallen for and accepted propaganda. Thereby leading them to support the government and its toxic narratives.
I base this opinion mostly on seeing how Russian propaganda has poisoned my mother-in-law's mind. Many media reports and various other sources have verified that she is not an isolated example, most Russians accept the same propaganda narratives.
OK, let's play this game. The logical fallacy here is the relationship between regime change in Ukraine and Russia. These are two distinct countries. It's like saying someone wanted to influence the outcome of the election in the USA to cause regime change in Canada. (I use this example because we know Russians were influencing the elections in the USA.)
A simply more unsettling conclusion from this narrative is that if there is a causal link indeed, and Ukraine taking a pro-EU direction can cause a regime change in Russia, it means that the basis of the latter is very weak - so weak it has to start the war to prevent its fall.
Would the US not be forced to react in some way if a pro-china party took over in Canada with the help of chinese influence? And China had the goal of integrating Canada into its military alliance?
That's your second strawman in this thread now by the way I think the legal limit is three so you're allowed one more.
Remember how mainstream media was reporting in 2003 that Powell is obviously lying? How the whole debacle about Iraqi WMDs was little more than a thinly veiled excuse to finish the war Bush Sr had started? Maybe that didn't happen in your country, but it was the reality in many Western countries.
Consider the business as usual in the EU. Whatever the EU is trying to do, there are always some countries that oppose it. Then there are negotiations, and some kind of compromise is ultimately reached, but nobody is truly happy about it. That's what decentralization does to you.
Or maybe consider Russia just before the invasion of Ukraine. Some countries and factions in the West considered Russia an important trading partners, while others saw it as an adversary and wanted to cut ties with it. There was no unified Western policy on anything related to Russia.
I’m not sure we will ever know the complete answer, but some of this change seems to involve Russia too.
I'm not sure what part of Russian history, or contemporary Russian society, gives people confidence in this idea?
I'm not being anti-Russian here either. I feel the same way about our nation here in the US. Even if we were to rid ourselves of Trump for instance, we would still have serious issues with a large body of people who support Trump-like policies. A wise Europe would still be obliged to be on guard against us.
Every nation has belligerent elements. Russia is no different. While, say, Putin, may be an expression of that belligerent element, I'm unconvinced that he is the belligerent element itself. I think it's foolish, potentially fatal, to make that assumption.
But it turns out a very militarized nation can become completely pacifist after suffering a complete utter defeat, suffering and destruction.
Culture can change, just like 1990s Russia was a break from past and future Russia. However the 1990s were a disaster and thus the culture changes went to the opposite side
And if you were willing to be utterly destroyed in order to utterly destroy Russia, then maybe this would work?
But at that point you've succumbed to exactly what you were trying to prevent. Ie - Your own destruction.
What we, at least we in the US, want is to figure out how to turn Russia towards peace without being utterly destroyed.
That's what the difficulty is.
We, on this side of the pond, prefer ideas that don’t involve national suicide.
The "eventually" you are referring to was nothing more than a polite "no", issued in the final statement of the summit as a consolation (one day we will invite you), after allies had made their negative decision.
Georgia and Ukraine hoped to receive an invitation to NATO and begin membership negotiations. Today, almost two decades later, they still haven't received an invitation nor started negotiations.
[0] https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/33711-document-3-memorand... page 5
My point is that culture can change, being aggressive in eastern europe is not the essence of Russia just like being aggressive in central europe turned out not to be the essence of Germany.
A fascist regime promises war, victory and glory, when that collapses the regime also collapses
Which was not really Germany's case. It was going to be, see the Morgenthau plan, but then the US realised they needed someone to help contain the Communists, and Germany become integrated into the wider West, not even 10 years after Hitler. Something that was willfully not allowed to Russia in the 1990s. (And thank Kohl for that, wouldn't want to be containing China!)
Regarding Germany, as opposed to 1918, defeat was not something they could escape, complete and utter destruction of cities, mass rapes, ethnic cleansing, POWs and occupation.
The strict contrast with the fascist promises of victory is the real engine of denazificatiom imo
Did not.
I’m mangling a quote from someone, but extreme environments breed extreme leaders.
To rise, Putin had to be better than his rivals. Presumably they were ruthless, clever, calculating etc.
I’m not sure we want to hear from his successor.
E.g. Stalin's successors
So yea, it's not just the government.
Crimea is a special situation. I won't reiterate its complex history here since there is plenty of written here, but I'd like to point out that one could have a view where Crimea is Russian and yet decry the invasion of Ukraine as illegitimate.
If anything for practical reasons: only 7% of its population is Ukrainian. It would be very a source of continuous ethnic tensions.
Hard Russian nationalism is much more than that
Such people claim that the entirety of Ukraine is just Russia and they mock them for otherwise being Polish. This narrative is an explicit outcome of an Imperial mindset
But that's the reason why using this "who does Crimea _belong to_" framing of the question is misleading. You will find many people who will say Russia and yet not necessarily subscribe to the imperialistic stance that Russia is employing.
And that's why there is a problem with the mentality of the Russian population. Literally NONE is able to say Crimea belongs to Ukraine, NONE. And that while internationally, it is part of Ukraine.
So no, my question is not misleading. When at least some Russians would say that Crimea actually belongs to Ukraine, I might have some hope. But right now, sorry, no.
I posit that the crimean question will also unnecessarily put in the same cohort all those people who do recognize the distinct culture of Ukraine and their right of self determination but also consider the past and present situation of crimea to be more nuanced.
EDIT: some Russians may recognize that Ukrainians have right to self determination but they may also recognize that today Crimea is populated by a vast majority of Russians and thus there giving that land back to Ukraine would lead to further bloodshed. And yes I have heard actual Russians having that position (I'm not Russian fwiw)
You might think this is normal, I don't. And because of that, I don't agree with statements like "it's not the Russian people, only the Russian government".
You didn't mention any Russian that sees it differently, and you confirm everything what I say. Except for the fact that you think it's normal and I don't.
Edit: What I said above is not correct and I apologize for that. After the annexation of Crimea, there was a protest in Russia with thousands of protesters. Some prominent politicians also openly opposed it.
Perhaps it's because they are few of them (fair enough mine is just personal experience, not a poll)
Or perhaps it's because you consider everybody who believes that Crimea is now populated mostly by Russians (and thinks that giving it back now will create more trouble than solve) as people who CHEERED the annexation.
I don't think it logically follows.
But I understand your feeling since there are so many people (even outside of Russia) that literally cheer for Russia getting their empire back. Unfortunate their noise surpasses any ability to have a nuanced conversation about this.
I wished humanity headed towards a peaceful resolution of conflicts where people can seek self determination and autonomy (basque, Catalan, Kurds, Palestinians, ...) instead of resolving such issues with invasion and pandering to imperialistic visions
So I don't understand how anybody can support "international agreement" by default. I certainly don't. Regarding Crimea I don't have an opinion, because I don't live there.
Germany was split into two by "international agreement", just as an example.
Contradiction right there
Kruschcev transferred the crimean oblast as a symbolic gesture.
Pointing this fact out does not contradict one's desire to not have Russia acquire more territory and behave in an imperialistic manner today
I have a good dozen of friends from Crimea despite visiting Crimea just a few times as a little kid – thousands of young people were forced out of their homes.
The russian logic is very perverted, yet completely predictable. If you are a national minority (even if your 7% claim was true) surrounded by russians, you should leave, and all your belongings should be redistributed among russians. But if you are a russian minority surrounded by different nations, then everyone around you should learn russian language, respect russian culture, otherwise russian tanks will come. Or maybe they won't, but only for the sake of global stability (otherwise it's justified)
Reminds me a bit of another leader around that same period. He also made his countrymen feel superior. That one is not beloved today anymore, and maybe that's the reason why that population was able to transform into a normal democratic country.
So it doesn't matter if the Russian people is the enemy in the sense of supporting their mafia government. They're not doing anything you wouldn't have done. Condemning them is condemning yourself and does no one any good.
There were good Germans. There were also Germans that pretended not to notice and then there were bad Germans. The ones in the middle are collectively just as guilty because they allowed the bad ones to do their thing. You don't get to stand by while such stuff unfolds and then claim innocence.
Right now, inside Russia there are Russians who are putting their lives on the line to help stop this war before it consumes their country. Their the 'Good Russians'. And then there are those in the middle - and plenty who have fled abroad - who pretend this isn't their problem. But they're enabling the rest and should be rightly condemned for it.
It took Germany a generation or more to really get it (and even now, some don't get it but that seems to be a factor just about everywhere, the bad will always attempt to take root again).
The country that I'm from still hasn't properly accepted the mountain of skulls and the rivers of blood that our wealth is founded on. In that sense Germany is now ahead, but with the afd it remains to be seen whether they can maintain that lead for much longer.
That said, this message shows terrible ignorance:
> They're not doing anything you wouldn't have done. Condemning them is condemning yourself and does no one any good.
The first part might be very well true. My grandparents and their siblings have been mostly perpetrators and bystanders, some where tagging-along, very few were opposed and none of them openly, just in 'inner exile'. I am lucky for the 'mercy of the late birth' that saved me from having to proof many of the virtues that I hold dearly under real pressure. But not condemning the wrongs my grandparents did, and not holding oneself to higher standards than I would hold others, doesn't do any good. Are you sure you are incapable of doing things in another place and another time that would make your today's self condemn you and your actions?
And you aren't. Or at least, we as a group aren't, compared to them as a group.
In the end, I don't criticize Russian war criminals so that they stop being war criminals. That has nothing to do with a lack of authority, but with a lack of naïvity: that's what weapons are made for. I criticize the leadership of the West that they don't do enough to stop them. That's where we can use words, luckily.
My feeling is that your perspective, likely shared by people like Bomber Harris or Netanyahu, does not match most peoples intuition nowadays.
You can't blame the population as a whole. But I suspect it's uncommon for the government to be completely disconnected from (some portion of) the population's sentiments.
However, that sentiment is shaped by the media available to the citizens, and in places like Russia, that means primarily by the government itself. So it's not so clear cut what the sentiment would have been had it not been for the governments propaganda.
(In the US we have the same overall situation, but the propaganda seems to mostly be driven by rich people who own media companies...)
Globally, it's pretty much oligarchs all the way down.
And yes, this means that in a democracy, the opposition's voters are screwed because they share in the responsibility, even if they were right. Why? Because they were unable to convince the majority of the wrongness of the majority vote.
But it's not as a practical matter in the US, or even in legalistic practice. Most legalistic factions in the US plainly treat the constitution itself (and/or its authors) as the source of its own authority.
That is the literal first paragraph of the US constitution. I cannot imagine a valid legalistic argument that ignores that. When first establishing the constitution, it also didn't appear in a vacuum, the pre-existing states and confederation were already democratic for some time. So all authority/validity/legitimacy the US constitution has comes from the population, back then. And through continuing use, participation and broad acceptance until present.
And of course, as a practical matter in a representative democracy, between elections, the people do have far less of an influence. They can basically only voice their opinions, threaten to vote differently in the next election, or start a revolution. But that doesn't absolve them of their responsibility on election day.
Exactly, back then. But those people are dead to a man. They are no longer people of the United States. Even if you count them as such, they would be extremely outnumbered by currently living people of the United States, and thus, democratically they can no longer confer any legitimate authority to the constitution. If they do confer any authority, it isn't democratic authority, because it has to be based on something else than the people.
> And through continuing use, participation and broad acceptance until present.
I think that's a pretty tenuous argument, all the time people constantly point to the constitution itself as authority for why they accept the constitution, rather than pointing to themselves as they should if they truly believed in the people's authority as opposed to gods, kings and holy texts. But even accepting that argument, at the very least you'd have to agree that if the people decided to change the constitution through means other than those the constitution propose, then that could still be perfectly democratic.
Yes, of course. If the voters, or at least their democratically elected representatives, decide that a new and different constitution is necessary, that's totally fine and expected. Some more modern constitutions even point this out explicitly.
I completely disagree. I know anecdata is useless but since you are generalizing I can as well add that all Russians I met, without exception, are normal people who just want to live a normal life, not to kill. And then there is the smaller violent part that is happy to mug, beat, and kill others, including their own people. What I can agree is that Russia has quite a problem with this "pat B" of their population because of systemic issues. But generalizing it like this, on the whole nation, is just like saying that violence has gender, rich people are bad and so on.
Next time you meet a Russian again ask about what they think about Russian Empire. Or who gets to keep Crimea.
Have a look what normal Russians are saying:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuZEvNlpKxg
It's by a guy who works for BBC and basically translates bits of Russian papers on his channel everyday.
It would be very hard to notice the difference between 10% and 9% by just meeting people. You'd have to meet and evaluate 1000s to measure it accurately enough. But you sure do notice the difference as a neighboring country when the tanks roll in.
So you do sometimes have to say things about nations despite it only reflecting a statistically small difference in people.
Whenever there's trouble, Russia's history demands a strong leader. When one arises, the strong leader soon becomes the trouble.
By ‘strong’, do you mean violent dictator?
Maybe some of the provinces that are held by force should be allowed self determination. Maybe less violence would then be ‘needed’.
If you force a Tatar to somewhere close to the Chinese border he will be perceived as "Russian" by the indigenous community, and their rejection will eventually make him identify as "Russian" himself, to bond with his peer displacees from other corners of the empire, and with locals who accept the empire. The exact same mechanism works in all directions, e.g. when some of those locals are displaced to somewhere near the Finnish border. The most important weapon of the Russian empire isn't the tank or the AK-47 or hard winters or sheer distance or vast amounts of mineral resources, it's industrial scale deportation for eradication of regional identity.
The same wealth disparity exists in the west. Are you suggesting Russia is the governing model in our future?
I, however, am talking about the gap between the wealth of the top 1 percent and the rest of society. When you have billionaires, the gap between a billionaire and every non-billionaire is the same - merely because of the nature of the size of a billion. It is so large that comparing a billion to a million is essentially equivalent to comparing a billion to a penny.
This is not in line with reality.
> Are you suggesting Russia is the governing model in our future?
If Trump and his buddies have their way: yes.
Russia is a continental state so it requires its Neighbors to be weak so they cant threaten Russia. As much as it tries to escape this logic, it can’t. Russia’s core interest is to dominate and subjugate its near abroad. It has to. It’s the only way for it to become a global power.
Unless of course doing so makes them far poorer and isolates them culturally/economically, and completely embarrasses their image of having a strong military.
A million casualties for a territorial stalemate is certainly one kind of winning.
The war also isn't a stalemate by any interpretation. In the nominal sense Russian forces are making steady progress, most recently having entered into Pokrovosk [2]. But beyond that - war is rarely, if ever, a real stalemate when there are still large scale combat operations playing out. Rather it transforms into a war of attrition, where progress becomes non-linear. Ukraine is in the midst of a severe manpower shortage, but they still have enough forces to competently hold their defensive lines. But at the point that their manpower gets stretched just beyond that point, everything will collapse rapidly. In a way it's vaguely akin to a siege, except the resource under pressure tends to be manpower instead of e.g. food or water.
[1] - https://www.newsweek.com/even-russian-propaganda-was-hesitan...
I would argue that is inaccurate: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60562240
2. I remember media sphere prior/at the time of invasion rather well. The general consensus was that Ukraine would fall in less than two weeks. The invasion itself started on the Fatherhood Defender's Day and I believe was supposed to be completed before the International Women's Day to make a good picture of Russian soldiers gifting flowers to Ukrainian women.
But as you try to make more sophisticated drones, to the point of aiming to fully replace men on the front, they start to become more and more expensive. You want them to be resistant to electronic warfare and you probably don't want to rely on fiber optics so you need some sort of fully autonomous processing unit on board, capable of generalized scenario processing. And you want them to be able to fly for a really long time, so you don't have to have deployment points front close to the front. And so on. You are gradually just reinventing the MQ-9 Reapers and their $30million+ price tag. And suddenly you've lost all the benefit of drones.
---
Russia started peace negotiations with Ukraine 4 days after invading. If you genuinely expect complete capitulation within 2 weeks, you don't start negotiating for peace after 4 days when the enemy would be in a relative position of strength. For that matter, a lot of their early maneuvers were clearly more performative than military in style, like the endless convoys which looked imposing but served no purpose and imposed logistical issues that Russia clearly was not prepared to deal with.
In reality I think Russia did expect there was a high probability that Ukraine would rapidly agree to a settlement, and absent Western involvement that probably would have been correct. And similarly I think the US was probably expecting that Russian forces would just scatter and run at the first sight of Western arms. In reality the optimistic view of both sides ended up not panning and so everybody ended up with a much more real war than they probably expected.
---
4 days is exactly the time frame to understand that initial calculations have gone wrong and it is time for damage control (try to pull out, initiate peace negotiations, etc).
Also even in terms of pure destruction and death, drones get like 99% of the media attention and analysis, yet good old fashioned artillery is still responsible for something like 80% of deaths. Drones are completely reshaping the modern battlefield, but they're working as a compliment to everything else rather than just overriding it. That might change in the distant future, but it's far from where we are today.
I am basing this on the blitz attack on Kyiv, not anyone's rhetoric. I guess in your mind those paratroopers at Hostomel and armor column from Belarus were going to Amazon Prime their food, ammunition, fuel.
There's also the post-invasion rounds of conscription, recruitment from prisons, and the infamous Prigozhin videos where he tells the MoD to stop sending so much ammunition because Wagner was too well-supplied on account of a multiyear war being totally the thing that the Kremlin planned for.
> including the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Who, in this conflict, have a much better reputation for calling Russia's strategy than Russia or you. And they'd probably show you the receipts if you engaged them directly.
> it transforms into a war of attrition
Okay I stopped caring, everything from here on out seems like you giving a lecture at a military academy but I have no reason to believe you know the first thing about the subject. Based on your another commentary it seems more like you are trying to make the Russian invasion seem to be proceeding normally by changing what normal is.
> And militarily they're fighting a war against an endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies
By… employing endless stream of their own meat and paying them obscene (locally) money. Difference is that Ukraine fights for survival.
Reading your comment, I’m a bit confused about your moral compass. Would you also call Polish Armed Forces during WW2 “endless stream of forcibly conscripted bodies” when they resisted numerically superior opponent?
As for people voluntarily fighting for a country - I think that's certainly a noble cause. Not only the cause itself, but because it exemplifies that the leaders of that country have shaped a system that people are willing to die, and kill, over. It's a validation of a society. Of course it can also be a proxy for desperation - as you mention Russian enlistment offerings are rather extremely generous, but at least it remains a system that people opt into knowing full well what it entails.
But on the other hand I find forced conscription barbaric. You are taking people who do not believe something is worth dying over, and forcing them to die, and kill, over it. I think it will be something looked upon in the future like we look upon slavery today. Is it a necessary evil? Maybe, but people argued the exact same of slavery in the past as well.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/1412425/gdp-ppp-share-wo...
only relevant for local buyers, world economic power is still denominated in GDP, a flawed metric yet one that can’t be gamed. And G7 > BRICS by far in this
This is likely also why G7 economies are relatively shrinking. There's less of a focus on "things" and more of a focus on gaming stuff to increase paper wealth, generally to the benefit of a very small percent of society.
[1] - https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/bottled-w...
Of course this says nothing at all about relatively small regional conflicts, but in the grand scheme of things I'm far more concerned about WW3 than I am about these. That's not to understate the impact of what can (and is) happening in these sort of conflicts, but at the end of the day I don't think humanity will ever 'evolve' beyond war, and so in the mean time I think the goal should be to not end our species over something that will inevitably look like a pointless waste of life in a few decades. Keep in mind that WW1 was unironically called 'The War to End All Wars' before we started attaching an ordinal to it.
> multipolar world
> nuclear rhetoric
> proxy war
Typical Russian schizophrenia to justify another conquest. How much are you getting per comment? 40 rubles?
Not looking forward to being your proxywar or small regional conflict. It’s amazingly frustrating to be dragged into this without any provocation or possibility to actually affect the situation. Just unfortunate geography I guess.
I don’t think nukes stopped the direct conflict between world powers. They made it possible for the first time. There is no reach to US without them.
War in Europe or parts of Asia is easy the old fashioned way and seems to happen on a regular basis.
It’s a pity Putin was gifted Crimea by the west.
But if I point out that this same thing applies to the Russians as a whole, then suddenly I'm racist.
Really though it’s because Russia mostly has nothing going for its millions of people except petrochemical exports.
It started to expand to the east in 16th century, which was and is still cruel to indigenous people of Siberia (e..g highest level of current war participation per capita).
South/Caucasus expansion was brutal and was displayed in Russian literature.
European states suffered from Russia for centuries as well.
Even if Putin wanted to join the E.U., the economy, social structures and institutions, and uneducated voting populace wouldn't allow it to be stable enough to join.
Russia at this point can't even be a successful authoritarian state like China. It's hard to say that it will never be a democracy, but those with a memory of the 1990's find that idea traumatic. Looking far forward in time, eventually global oil independence and demographic decline may force economic reform.
How do you measure that?
Russia likely doesn't meet these requirements, and the U.S. has had many failed democratic experiments in places like Afghanistan where this culture is missing.
From that lens, loosing a few millions in a "pre-emptive strike" to save the bulk of population looks reasonable. Don't ask me how they ended up with this picture of reality.
Joining the EU would be somewhat nonsensical as they would gain very little from it and cede substantial sovereignty in exchange. It's the same reason places like Norway have no interest in joining the EU.
But Russia never inquired in good faith. It was only ever sarcastically. And had it joined NATO (perhaps because the west was stupid, which it is), then right now we'd be in the pickle of trying to reconcile one NATO member invading another (likely) NATO member, and wondering what to do about it. Russia doesn't honor its treaties, neither according to the spirit of the law nor to the letter.
Now that there's no longer any point in hiding it, we should expand NATO to include everyone that is marginally adjacent to Russia. Japan, South Korea, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan. Hell, why not throw Taiwan in.
What asymmetry are we talking about here? The Warsaw Pact disintegrated because it was held together by force by the Soviet Union and as that had ceased to exist, the Warsaw Pact had no reason to exist either (ask yourself if you think for example Poland would be in a military alliance with Russia if it could choose freely; the same for Czechoslovakia (invaded 1968-1991) and Hungary (1956)). Maybe if Russia sincerely tried to become part of the Western World, many things would look different now, buth we both know it did not.
> Western states chose to expand and entrench NATO
Well if the russians could once think about other peoples as having free agency it would help them immensely to get out of their eternal (and of course false) victim status. Why exactly do you think the Central European states jumped onto the chance to get into NATO as fast as possible? By whom are they feeling threatened? Of course since at least 2008 (Georgia) everyone knows the feeling was right and Russia will continue mass killings of their neigbours unless they meet a stronger enemy.
It should be mentioned that Russia's attempt at "We don't need NATO, we have our own NATO at home" (CSTO) is hilariously awful and failed to keep the peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan just recently.
The Warsaw Pact ceased to exist because it always was a joke and Russia/SU has never had any true desire or ability to protect these other countries... they merely want to discourage them in any way possible from "joining the other team".
Until Russia stops being Russia, they will always be the problem.
They succeeded to some extent to integrate Russia into the Western world, but failed or didn't try to actually change Russia. Already in first Putin's term it becomes clear how will the country proceed.
> This opposition was rooted in explicit assurances
No such explicit assurances have ever existed and if someone claims russian politicians have believed some spoken sentences as ratified pacts, they are either dumb or lying. Anyway, Russia also promised in writing to guarantee the territorial integrity and safety of Ukraine (1994), so there is no reason to believe anything they say or write for the foreseeable future.
> You speak of Russia’s aggression toward its neighbors,
For which they never apologised.
> Yet popular memory outside Russia tends to focus almost exclusively on the Soviet attack.
For which they never apologised and annexed Karelia.
And this is exactly why many people say the only good Russian is a dead one. If the country and nation wants to be universally hated, it should proceed exactly like that.
You can look at this issue from both sides. The Budapest Memorandum was exactly that—a memorandum—and it was never ratified by Russia. As such, it carries no more legal weight than the security assurances provided by NATO. Moreover, it was largely the Clinton administration, together with the EU, that pressured Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons, since no one wanted the emergence of a new nuclear state in Europe.
> For which they never apologised.
You are also incorrect on the historical point. Russia officially apologised for the Winter War during Yeltsin’s presidency, along with issuing several other apologies for Soviet-era crimes. Finland, by contrast, has never apologised for its own actions, nor does it adequately teach about its own atrocities. Ask the average Finn how Finland acquired Petsamo or about Finland’s role in the siege of Leningrad, and you are unlikely to encounter much regret or acknowledgment of responsibility.
> And this is exactly why many people say the only good Russian is a dead one. If the country and nation wants to be universally hated, it should proceed exactly like that.
And that is just sheer racism and speech hate.
There were no 'security assurances provided by NATO', but I also agree any political agreement signed or even ratified by Russia carries zero significance as they do not feel to be bound by it. They only understand force, not dialogue, and as such can't be a part of the civilised world.
> You are also incorrect on the historical point.
I am correct on that, there is no formal apology for the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, for example.
> And that is just sheer racism and speech hate.
That may be, but it's also completely understandable in the face of russian behavior of the past over 100 years, of the russian public indifference to the heinous crimes perpetrated by their army in Ukraine and it is still way better and less racist and hateful that daily murdering Ukrainian children in their sleep.
And I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world. They cofounded BRICS which comprises near to a majority of the world's population, and also a greater share of the world's economy than e.g. the G7. Rather the "problem", and one that applies to China too, is that they will never behave in a submissive fashion to the US. They want a multipolar world, whereas the political establishment in the US still dreams of a hegemonic world order, akin to what we had after the USSR collapsed. This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict, and as the saying goes - when two elephants fight it is the grass that suffers.
If only this had a more complicated explanation than something akin to schoolyard drama.
> NATO largely stopped that by putting them under a common umbrella.
You're thinking of democratization, the end of imperialism, and the elimination of aggressive regimes. Helped along by the financial devastation caused by the war.
> I don't think Russia is broadly hostile to the world.
Sure, unless you listen to all of their broadly hostile rhetoric or are on a Malaysian or Azerbaijani airliner or something.
> This inevitably sets the stage for geopolitical conflict
This your way of saying Russia needs to cut undersea cables and invade neighbors?
You're right, a democratic country would never do anything like that.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/13...
Can you point to the place I said this? Does the US shooting down an Iranian airliner somehow make Russia not hostile to the world? These seem like independent things.
I can tell you where it's not.
https://www.isis.org.my/2024/07/04/pew-study-finds-more-mala...
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/asia/malaysia-russia-vladimi...
"Pew study finds more Malaysians, Singaporeans view Russia favourably; backing of Palestine, Putin’s macho image seen as key factors
Of the respondents in the 35 countries surveyed, Malaysians had the most positive view on Russia."
It's not anywhere close to any place that supports your beliefs.
EDIT: https://fulcrum.sg/malaysias-royal-rendezvous-in-russia-reas...
"From 6 to 10 August [2025], Ibrahim, the Malaysian King (Yang di-Pertuan Agong), visited Russia at the invitation of President Vladimir Putin. This marked the first visit of a Malaysian head of state to Russia since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries in 1967."
Another question regarding Russia's posture toward the world, is Azerbaijan in Europe or the rest of the world?
What does this have to do with both of them repeatedly instigating territorial disputes with their neighbors? Granted the US certainly isn't a saint in that regard but its been quite a while since the Mexico stuff.
Annexing pieces of neighbors and defying US economic interests seem like fairly disjoint activities to me.
There’s a weird fetishism across Russia: everything is centered around gay sex. There’s no cooperation in the world, either you take it and become “petukh” (cock) or you give it and become “pakhan” (shot caller).
Lol no, they would not have sabotaged their defensive alliance against a very real, belligerent, immediate enemy for the sake of defending against a potential enemy decades in the future. In any fantasy where the West has that much foresight, they have lots of better options.
Russia doesn't need to be submissive. All Russia has to do is stop starting violence with its neighbors and around the world. Don't mess with Ukraine. Don't mess with Syria. Try actually making their people's lives better instead. (I can already hear you complaining "but the US--" stop. Tu quoque is a fallacy.)
The bar is embarrassingly low. Even after they annexed Crimea, the rest of the world was willing to pretend Russia was a reasonable actor. But it wasn't enough for Russia, mostly for Putin himself I suspect.
And also, I think many people have a rather distorted view of the world. When you say 'the rest of the world' I assume you are speaking as most do when they use this term - the Anglosphere, Europe excluding Russia/Belarus, and then the handful of oddballs like Japan and sometimes South Korea. What percent of the world do you think this is? It's less than 15%, and trending downward.
That's why you don't do things like this, unless you're actively working to both establish and demonstrate your dominance over another country, which we were. I just don't think the moralizing angle can be argued in good faith. If you want to see 'starting shit' - we just mostly randomly invaded Venezuela and kidnapped their president which is pretty lol. This moralizing angle is just disingenuous or naive.
Oh I see, you really are just clueless. Do you think missiles need a "land route" to be dangerous?
You're still leaning on tu quoque too. I don't disagree that the US had behaved badly. That continues not to make Russia any smarter.
I am basing my arguments entire on realpolitik - great powers can be expected to act in their own self interest. It's consistently reliable and helps explain (and predict) things that are otherwise incomprehensible if you try listening to anybody's rhetoric. Countries do not act morally.
When a relatively weak and strategically important country tries to align itself against a giant on its doorstep, that's never going to lead to happy things for that country in the longrun. One of the countries that may be next on the chopping block for the US is Cuba, which I think makes our likely motivation behind this whole thing somewhat more clear.
Not joining, of course, but Russia did, both the people and Putin. The West had different plans, as we learned.
'From Lisbon to Vladivostok': Putin Envisions a Russia-EU Free Trade Zone - SPIEGEL ONLINE, 2010 [0]
"We propose the creation of a harmonious economic community stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok," Putin writes. "In the future, we could even consider a free trade zone or even more advanced forms of economic integration. The result would be a unified continental market with a capacity worth trillions of euros." [0]
[0] http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/from-lisbon-to-vl...
Maybe this could offer more insight:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/vladim...
The Putin regime began with Putin using military force to arrest any disloyal oligarchs while formulating his anti-Western ideology. But sequence of event explains why most Russians today have zero faith/interest in joining the Western World.
Country was destroyed, markets were destroyed, industries were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands died in ethnical conflicts, hundreds of thousands died from hunger. It was all a huge mistake and I hope we'll never repeat it.
> Country was destroyed, markets were destroyed, industries were destroyed.
And yet somehow, mysteriously, the exact same shock therapy that Russia couldn't handle produced a thriving and prosperous Poland, Czechoslovakia, etc.
> for promises that we would be treated as equals that were never kept
Russia has an economy roughly the size of Benelux, and it is treated exactly as such. The problem is that the Russians have a perpetual and hilarious delusion that they're an equal to the United States. Russia can barely compete with individual US states, let alone the US itself. California alone has a larger economy than the entire Russian Federation. Texas alone has a larger economy than the entire Russian Federation.
In fact, Russia has a roughly comparable economy to Canada, which no one thinks is even remotely a power equal to the US.
Russia is treated fairly. The problem is that Russia has delusions of grandeur, so 'fairly' is not good enough. They feel slighted by being a 'mere' Canada. And instead of doing what the Chinese did, building up so their power matches their aspirations, they just awkwardly gnaw at their neighbours instead. And then they act all surprised when everyone correctly describes them as a bully and bands together for collective security.
(But of course none of Russia's behaviour is actually aimed at getting other countries to respect them, that's just a regime narrative intended to distract the Russian people from their falling living standards as Putin and his cronies rob Russia blind. The more internationally isolated Russia gets, the more indispensable Putin can pretend to be.)
Or if we get more serious: it's mix of imperial ambitions, feeling of been humiliated by west and desire of revenge, (cultural level) aggression, arrogance, ignorance and been sure that Russia is a special country with special pathway and superior culture and one of world superpowers (that been ignored and this is not "fair")
A couple of days after russia started war, on it's official news agency site was auto published article that was supposed to be victory lap (after all it was supposed to be 3 day special operation). It was promptly removed but not before it was archived. You can read decent translation here and it will show you some glimpses of what I wrote above https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/t2vz4v/ria_news_ac...
For reference: I was born back in USSR and lived there till my early teen years. Been closely following russian media, discussion platforms, etc ever since.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_German_uprising_of_1953
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_Spring
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1956_Georgian_demonstrations
Glasnost and Perestroika under Gorbachev were not benevolence but necessary because the centralized power of the Soviet Union was dwindling. The SU became more and more occupied with fixing its own problems and could no longer hold together the Eastern Bloc by influence or force. Which is why the Eastern Bloc then slowly dissolved. This didn't start with the German unification, but earlier, and encompassed Poland, Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989
The SU (who are actually dominated by, but different from "the Russians") certainly would have liked to hold it together. And while under Yeltsin, there was a period of acceptance of the dissolution of the SU, currently Putin seems to want to revive it, at least in terms of territory.
It's a government comprised of people that weren't elected that destroys countries it supposed to govern by forcing non-rational choices that people hate but too afraid to openly criticize.
The level of life in EU is declining, while rising in Russia.
What EU can offer us? Nothing.
Look at any chart that shows any useful economic metric or things like life expectancy of eastern/central European countries before and after they joined the EU. It's almost to good to be true.
> The level of life in EU is declining, while rising in Russia.
That's quite easy when your GDP per capita is behind Trinidad & Tobago or even Cuba.
Russians are essentially a european people and has a lot more in common with the EU than BRICS.
Also, both are headed full-throttle towards a demographic disaster so might as well do it together
And of course your comment about unelected officials acting irrationally that people cannot criticize surely reminds you of home
Stop forcing that bs.
russians see themselves as a unique unicorn high above any other nation on the planet (because of Pushkin and Tchaikovsky, and the physiological ability to drink 1L of vodka without getting sick).
Citations, please.
> What EU can offer us? Nothing.
Right, what is clear from your messages in this thread is that Russia only sees value in other things it can take over / steal / destroy. May I ask what Russia has to offer to the rest of the world?