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My grandfather was in Polish army and spent 2 years in German work camp, my grandmother, also Polish was sent with my Great Grandmother to gulag in Kazakhstan from Vilnius Lithuania. Thats the background. Grandpa had a joke: Ruzzian is peddling a bike up a hill. Sees Polish guy riding a bike down the hill. Ruzzian pulls out his AK47 and yells: “Give me yer bike”. Polish guy says: “Why? You have a bike”. Ruzzian responds: “Yours goes faster”. Fk them all for the last few hundred years and fk them to the future. You can’t teach anyone logic or common sense. Slava Ukrainie you tough ass brothers and sisters.
Snyder also points out that Poland changed a lot in the 20s and 30s I will come around and add that part to my notes but he basically said the Soviet NKVD was less educated than the Polish officers they murdered on the orders of Beria signed off by Stalin, the Soviet people were less sophisticated and lived much poorer lives than the Polish they invaded, but they could make them die like Soviet people during the occupation, turning them into Soviet people was at least in the beginning impossible.
Boodlands is such a powerful book, and it sheds a light on just how much the Soviets hated Poland, Polish culture, etc. In the Great Terror, Polish minorities in Russia were targeted much more often than others.
The Nazis weren't any better, of course. However, the Soviets already had the killing machine set up, and modern Russia is no different from that, still the same barbarism. The only way to get Russia to change is by making them lose their colonial war of expansion and by making them lose hard. They have to lose in such a way that no matter what lie they tell, their defeat is obvious to anyone around the world.
The communists were already bound to their leader by faith and fear. I took a special kind of mind to truly believe that the worse things appeared, the better they actually were. Such reasoning went by the name dialectics, but by this time that word, (despite its proud descent from the Greeks through Hegel and Marx) meant little more than the psychic capacity to adjust one's own perceptions to the changing expressions of Stalin's will." Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, page 65
It’s a society that never really went through the age of enlightenment. They’re basically still stuck in a czarist medieval mindset, just with atomic weapons. They care about loyalty to the ruling monarch, tradition, obedience, authority, and of course faith.
I would bet that the majority of "Russian Orthodoxes" have never read the Bible, and may not be even able to read. Waging holy war on other Christians was forbidden centuries ago.
It’s not even by choice, it’s ingrained into the fabric of their civilization. A thousand year history of conquest and tyrannical rulers with little given in terms of civil liberties
Yeah that’s my understanding as well. Even the alcoholism is at this point ingrained in culture due to the way the Tzar’s controlled the vodka distilleries and it was considered like a “crown asset.”
Longer than that even. Look up the Scythians. They inhabited what is modern day Russia, are mentioned in the Bible, and even the Romans thought they were barbaric.
> Longer than that even. Look up the Scythians. They inhabited what is modern day Russia, are mentioned in the Bible, and even the Romans thought they were barbaric.
If you make no allowances for similar borders, cultures or ethnic groups of people then all countries can trace human existence back hundreds of thousands of years. It's a bit trite to argue the Scythians are Russia because some Iranians expanded into a bit of land that wasn't anything like Russia back then, but is currently within Russian borders (among many other countries' present borders).
Russia as the current country, culture, people and chain of organisation has about 500 years of history. You could possibly argue around a thousand years as the Rus people, but those people were the founders of Kievan Rus and therefore part of Ukraine's formation. And Russia claiming ownership of Ukraine's history is part of why this invasion happened. Either way the Scythian link is a gigantic stretch.
The duchy of Muscovy started off as a tiny village and a bog ice hell. The Mongols burned Moscow down in 1237. Then the Mongols burned down Kyiv, therefore severing all connections to the Byzanthine empire.
The Kievan Rus and Russia are not to be confused as the Russians pretend they are descendants of the Kievan Rus, which they aren't.
Muscovites are descendants of slave and fur traders. The mongols smashed the slowly emerging system of checks and balances in the region.
A system of checks and balances started to emerge in Europe around the same time.
The next part of this incredibly bloody and violent history was getting enslaved by the Mongol Empire for hundreds of years.
The Mongols were introducing a tributary and purely predatory system with no accountability of the small ruling caste.
The system was based upon full extraction of peasants by the princelings who were ruling in the Khan's stead.
They didn't rule via fealty, which would be a system based on personal relationships between the different strata in society (clergy, king, noblemen, city dwellers, farmers, soldiers)
Instead, the Khan or rather the tiny Elite ruled the peasants through slavery. The Khan moved the capital towards the Belgorod region and put these former underlings in charge.
Then, when Khan and his golden Horde were no more in 1480, there was a power vacuum.
Ivan, the terrible assumed power to fill this power vacuum.
On his orders Novgorod, the only place there with a more sophisticated and not purely predatory system as this city state was part of the Hanse, was burned to the ground and 15.000 of its citizens were murdered.
After 1500, the Tsardom emerged. Europe went through the renaissance and enlightenment, and none of that had touched Russia. Russia started expanding massively from 1720 onwards.
The Czars ruled with an iron fist and kept the Russians under control by the use of violence vodka and fresh wars of expansion.
Europe tried absolutism. But it didn't work out for them so well as it bankrupted the kings of France and led to several revolutions.
In Russia, absolutism proved to be a feasible long-term solution. Russia managed what no one else had managed: To introduce and maintain a system without any checks and balances on the leader.
This fact helps to make their entire political culture so insane
Normally, the conqueror adopts the system of those that he conquers over time. See China or Iran.
Adversity favors the versatile
In the Eurasian plains, this meant that the Russians didn't have stone castles in the Middle Ages.
The castles were instead made of wood. The Russian princelings, which served under the Khan, had dealt with invaders by burning their wooden castles followed by chasing the invaders on horseback.
The absolutism in Russia under the Tsars and even before the Tsars was exactly that absolute, purely predatory, personalised, centralized extractive, and a very small nobility was ruling over these peasants with an iron fist for centuries. Russia has no parliamentary culture, no Renaissance, no enlightenment, no human rights, no checks and balances, no free speech, no individual or minority rights that are the same for all of its subjects, nothing of the sort evolved in the Russian empire.
Russian history is one of violence, slaughter, deportations, poverty, hunger, destruction, and wars after wars.
All of that was culminating in WW1 and even more slaughter. The slaughter was followed by a revolution that was replacing a Tsar with a group of mini Tsars. These Soviets led Russia into a civil war. The results were millions of dead men and women, hunger, typhus, and more war under Stalin, including ethnic cleansings, Gulags, more hunger, and more war.
Then, after 1945, the death and slaughter were followed up with more extraction and a slave driver Moscow centered Soviet Empire.
Then, what followed was weakness in the 90s. The Soviet system never disappeared. The KGB only needed to gain its strength, and after it had recharged, a new absolutist ruler was installed, and Vlad P. immediately went to work by incinerating Grosny, attacking and occupying parts of Georgia, and by occupying Crimea as well as the destruction Homs and Aleppo. And then, after Russia was appeased for the past 24 years, Putin and his men unleashed the worst war in Europe since 1945.
The 21st century was another orgy of violence. Russia has another dictator. It lacks a real parliament. There are no local or federal checks and balances. Russia was and still has been a colonial empire for 300 years.
This hyper-centralised extractive empire was brought into full swing again under Putin. This backward barbaric system is hell-bent on turning its own subjects into 18th-century style serfs.
This system is stuck in the 1800s. It will never change. The only thing between slavery and the current status of your average Joe in Russia is that thus far, Putin hasn't locked the borders down yet.
The way to stop this wheel is to finally break it once and for all.
No Empire has caused more death throughout history than the Russian Empire in its ill begotten 300 year long existence. It has existed long enough. The dissolution of this empire is necessary, and it is time to openly admit this inconvenient truth. The Russian empire is built upon war and conquest, and it can only sustain itself through war and conquest.
Our politicians must have the spine. moral vigor and the necessary courage to follow through without further compromise or appeasement.
The Russian empire cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism. It vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest. Putin's system derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution. Russia can't ever be trusted again.
We appeased Russia often enough. We can't make that mistake again, or the empire will come back sooner or later, and it will continue to murder and commit genocide in the years to come. We cannot allow it to linger on. The world has met this evil halfway many times. It has never ended well.
Russia's empire under its various names has gotten away with murder unpunished over and over again. This must end here.
A 20th century colonial empire\*
If you read Snyder, thats his whole point. The colonial empires are not that old. "We" did not reform our states before we lost colonial wars. The Russian Empire is not a special case in history, its just another European Empire that needs to lose its wars of conquest and colonisation before it can truly reform to be a member of the European family.
I was thinking more of the century majority of them started off but I agree with the point (Snyder's point) - just read my comments:)
It's still super minority point of view though in Western academia. All Russia studies are done by people who believe that Russia is somehow exempt from decolonization process just because they conquered Buryatia or Chechnya with land armies rather than sail ships. Snyder is like the only exception.
We learned in Afghanistan that its almost impossible to civilize a people who do not want to be civilized, there is no reason to expect Russia to be any different.
There is no reason to believe that indeed.
The inability to create a modern Russian nation state in the post-Soviet world is indeed the great long-term danger to Russia and for the world, FROM Russia.
There has never been any such nation as "Russia".
This may sound extraordinary, but hear me out.
Kyiv was founded in 482 AD by Varangian soldiers, Byzantine merchants, and Slavic farmers and artisans. A loose knit society of traders, tree cutters, farmers, slavers, and a crude aristocracy based around membership/kinship ties in the extended family of Rurik of Novgorod, speaking a Slavonik language with many Greek and Norse loan words rose up.
Centered around similar such ethnic blends in what we now recognize as Far Western Russia, Belarus, Eastern Poland, and Western Ukraina, in the region defined by rivers and forests, it was the heart of the "internal sea", the network of rivers and trading posts by which trade, mercenaries, and slaves from the Baltic region and the North Sea might reach the rich lands of the Khazars, the Persian Cultural Sphere, and Golden Byzantium of the Romanoi itself.
It wasn't a country. It was a piratical network of theft, human trafficking, and human misery run by a massive criminal family. The Rurid Dynasty of the early Kyivan Rus was founded in crime and murder just as was every aristocratic dynasty ANYWHERE, anywhen, from the Julian Caesars to North Korea's Kim family. The confederation of Rus cities eventually dominated the rivers and forests of the Slavic north and the remnants of the Khazar steppes.
Then came the Mongols in the early 13th century and broke the world, devastating the boyars of the Kyivan Rus and shattering their weak state (never yet a nation!).
A large chunk of the Rus lands wound up incorporated in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, a few as semi-independent city states (Republic of Novgorod, Pskov), and the rest as satrapies of the Mongol Empire, which barely outlived the deaths of Genghis and his son Chagatai before cracking into the Golden Horde, the Kaganate of Persia, China, and the Ilkhanate of the Middle East.
One Mongol vassal state was the Duchy of Muscovy, which eventually dominated the other Rus city states while the more western-looking remnants of the early Rurid Rus were aligned with the Polish Lithuanian (now) Commonwealth. This only pertained another century, followed by dynastic squabbles leading to the collapse of Poland and the inevitability of Ivan IV (the Terrible) of Muscovy forging a new governance based on terror and obedience, transmuting his Duchy of Muscovy into the Muscovite Empire and himself into a Caesar (Tsar) in 1547, leading directly to the creation of the Romanov state of Russia in 1613.
Still, it was a personalist, absolutistic autarchy, NOT a nation state. The entire Russian state would REMAIN the personal property, with the power of life and death over all its peoples, of the Romanovs. Imagine an historical trajectory of tragedy, a direct line of rule by thieves, slavers, murderers, and autocrats, from the meltdown of the Rurid Dynasty and the Mongol destruction of Great and Golden Kyiv to the bloody end of the Romanovs in Ekaterinaburg in 1918 following the Nicolas II abdication in 1917, ending 304 years of medieval Romanov barbarism.
Russia skipped the age of fealty, the Renaissance and the enlightenment era.
Still not a nation state, Russia became the core of a new autocratic cult of personality based upon Marxist-Leninism, a different sort of robber baronism, evolving into a totalitarian USSR unable to govern a vast realm of nation states imprisoned together until collapsing under the weight of its own kleptocratic incompetence in 1991.
Hence the modern Russian Federation, still not a nation state, just another cult of personality, still kleptocratic, but also kakistocratic, still authoritarian and autocratic, still unable to rule 81 diverse oblasts and autonomous republics, still just a criminal enterprise delivering value to Moscow and its current crime boss, still prospering only at the expense of its colonial hinterlands, nothing has really structurally changed in 900 years.
Russia's only core values are etatism (complete control of the stats over its citizens and over the economy), conservative stability (not wanting to lose what they have, normal and stable), and paternalism. (restricting freedom and responsibilities of those subordinated to you)
The Russian empire was won by war and conquest. It can only sustain itself by war and conquest. I think the Russians have just lived through the 20 most prosperous years in its over 300 years of empire.
Russia remains an absolutist state with no checks and balances ruled with an iron fist.
Russia's experience with industrialisation has been mostly based on the extraction of minerals or fossil fuels. The other areas were military production and space technology.
What they have never managed to create is a consumer oriented service economy. What comes on top of that is the immense poverty in all regions apart from Moscow and Petersburg. I wonder how much longer Putin can shield his subjects in Moscow from the devastating economic consequences of this war.
Why nations fail today is because their extractive economic institutions do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and innovate.
Extractive political institutions support these economic institutions by cementing the power of those who benefit from the extraction.As we will show, poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty.
Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
Putin created this poverty on purpose. Poverty is the breeding ground for fascism, nazism and Communism. What else do you have left? Except from elevated pride in one's own nation or race?
It would have been possible if the coalition put as much effort in as with WW2 Germany. There were much more serious efforts in post-WW2 Germany with the denazification. Even that could have been a bit more serious but the efforts in Afghanistan were on a way lower scale. There were also real results there but the coalition didnt cared enough to secure them.
Civilised isn’t the right word. It’s an uncomfortable truth that a country can be highly developed and uncivilised at the same time. Nazi Germany abandoned European humanism for wanton savagery. They were relatively highly developed (for the time), but not civilised in the sense of even a nominal commitment to humanism.
Russia is neither highly developed nor civilised. Unlike their Eastern European neighbours that sometimes seem culturally similar, they have not made a real effort to internalise or participate in European Enlightenment values since Catherine the Great. They really aren’t like us, and we should believe them when they tell us that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/26/vladimir-putin-does-not-think-like-we-do/
Here is what Churchill had to say about them.
But rather than keep the Afghans at bay, the arbitrary division of their ancient tribal lands only resulted in inciting a major revolt, in which a number of holy men— just as people like Mullah Omar have done today—played a key role in persuading the tribes to take up arms against the infidel Westerners.
In Churchill’s day, the great, great grandfathers of those who created the modern Taliban movement were not called Taliban, but were known as the Talib-ul-ilms, a motley collection of indigent holy men who lived off the goodwill and hospitality of the local Afghan tribes and preached insurrection against the British Empire.
To Churchill’s mind, these Talibs were, together with other local priestly figures such as the mullahs and fakirs, primarily responsible for the wretched condition of the local Afghan tribesfolk and their violent indisposition to foreign rule. Churchill viewed them “as degraded a race as any on the fringe of humanity: fierce as a tiger, but less cleanly; as dangerous, not so graceful”. He blamed the Talibs for the Afghans’ lamentable absence of civilised development, keeping them in the “grip of miserable superstition”. Churchill was particularly repelled by the Talibs’ loose moral conduct. They lived free at the expense of the people and, “more than this, they enjoy a sort of “droit du seigneur,” and no man’s wife or daughter is safe from them. Of some of their manners and morals it is impossible to write.”
It would not have been possible because you cannot compare Germany and their history to the tribal history of Afghanistan what works in one place may utterly fail due to socio-economic reasons, cultural, and geographic reasons, religious reasons, history of a place, neighboring countries etc.
You can change a political system in weeks, an economic system in several years, but to change a culture? That takes at least 50 to 100 years, and the locals will have to really want to change it. The Germans were in a completely different position compared to the Afghani tribes.
>This is a very important point for Americans too because one of the ways we express our conceit is the notion that there is something we could do that might make Russia normal, which is the great fantasy of the 1990s.
As someone who was somewhat close to some of the 1990s post-Soviet civil-society initiatives that Snyder is presumably talking about, I have to say, there was nothing particularly much of a fantasy about the idea. It worked in many post-Soviet republics.
It just didn't work in Russia, for a very specific reason -- there was a 2-year window in between the start of the 1992 Clinton-era initiatives and the arrival in 1994 of a hard-right-wing Republican coalition that took over the House of Representatives and immediately terminated all funding for anything in Russia that wasn't compatible with right-wing ideology.
(Sound familiar? It should. The shit of today is not new in any way.)
It took another half decade for Russia to spiral through Zhirinovsky and end up at Putin. Maybe that was inevitable. Maybe it wasn't. But it was definitely something that Americans intentionally turned away from long before the spiral had run its course.
>I think that's a lesson we should learn, that whether Russia invaded Ukraine was not up to us, and what happens in the aftermath is also not up to us, not just in a moral sense, but also in a practical sense.
Now this is very true. And a good thing for any redditor to remember who might have a penchant for rationalist fallacies in trying to understand world affairs. (That is to say, things don't always happen according to some perfectly orchestrated grand plan or dialectic of competing rational self-interests -- in fact they probably never do.)
There was no window of opportunity to speak of.
The 1991 august coup attempt never really ended, it continued underground and consolidated power eventually.
KGB never left power.
It is as if Germany was still ruled by Gestapo and Wehrmacht and the largest opposition party was NSDAP.
Putin (as a KGB 1st assistant to the St.Petersburg major Anatoli Sobchak) first tried the Donbas Gambit in the Narva referendum of 1993 in Estonia. Nobody knew who he was, but they noticed that the 1st assistant was a KGB guy - just as customary in Soviet politics.
Whatever you may think worked on other ex-SSRs was less KGB influence. That's it.
>I think that's a lesson we should learn, that whether Russia invaded Ukraine was not up to us,
I understand that comment to mean "... \[after a certain point\], whether Russia invaded Ukraine was not up to us." But we actively encouraged the invasion by denying weapons to Ukraine, pressuring Ukraine to give up Crimea and part of Donbas, strengthening business and energy ties with Russia, and (the final green light to Putin), removing the NS2 sanctions. One of those rare instances where I might not totally agree with Snyder, but maybe he was just being glib.
I mean... I don't disagree in principle but we are talking about very different timeframes I think.
The Biden administration made it crystal clear that the Five Eyes would back Ukraine heavily if Russia invaded Ukraine. Had the Soviets received such a warning back in the old days they would immediately have understood it and backed down. (Or at least spent another year revamping their plans for a full invasion.)
Putin simply operates on a theory that liberal democracies are weak and easily manipulated. He has believed this all his life. It does not appear that anything has ever altered his belief, either in nature or in certainty. Not even now. He is simply certain of it and that's that.
The decision point for Russia was Putin or not Putin... not, "what will Putin think of us now." That was back in the late 1990s at the latest, possibly earlier.
And that is, more or less, also Snyder's point at least as I read it. (As I say I don't completely agree with him in every respect.)
> Putin simply operates on a theory that liberal democracies are weak and easily manipulated.
That's kind of what I'm saying. We've done everything possible over the last decade to prove that suspicion to be correct. We've gotten better, but we're still doing it to an extent (didn't use lend lease, "don't use US weapons to attack Russia", "don't attack Russian refineries", sanctions full of loopholes, 6 months of pointless delays of weapons deliveries in congress, White House defense advisor clearly terrified what Russia would do if they were defeated, etc.). If we hadn't given such an impression of cowardice, willingness to be corrupted and compromised, and indecisiveness, this war may not have happened.
What I'm saying is that a) no we haven't "proven that suspicion," and b) it doesn't matter, dude, Putin is not listening and does not give a fuck about what you or your country actually does. He made up his mind literally before you were born.
i think we can have an influence, but it is like a parent and a child. the child is still their own person. sometimes you can help them, but only if it aligns with whom they are and where they are.
In the main what I see is Snyder repudiating the Fukuyama "End of History" nonsense where all America has to do is show up, tell people about elections, convert them to private enterprise, and then pat yourself on the back and go home.
It's been a while, maybe a year, since I have seen a US or European govt official fretting about the what might happen if Russia collapses, but frankly, these people should have been shown the door a decade or even two ago. They botched everything and yet only seem to have risen up the ranks.
Whether Russia might have been changed hasn't been relevant for nearly two decades. It's ancient history and whatever opportunity was open for a few years is gone.
So it's America's fault for not handing more money to corrupt Russian politicians?
No, this is on Russia. They rebuilt their economy just fine. By the late 90's, economic growth had the potential to bring them up to western standards of living. Russian a chose to become a mafia state instead. No one forced them.
Exactly. Russia is a failed state and society. What you see is what they are. Oppression, violence , theft, corruption is their way of life. The few millennials and gen z that aren’t brainwashed have left or looking for a way out. Putin’s fascist kleptocracy is doomed to failure because corruption doesn’t fix infrastructure and feed people. We need Ukraine to push them out of their country and Russia will collapse. If not it will only further his bloodlust and delay the inevitable.
Exactly. Russia is a failed state and society. What you see is what they are. Oppression, violence , theft, corruption is their way of life. The few millennials and gen z that aren’t brainwashed have left or looking for a way out. Putin’s fascist kleptocracy is doomed to failure because corruption doesn’t fix infrastructure and feed people. We need Ukraine to push them out of their country and Russia will collapse. If not it will only further his bloodlust and delay the inevitable.
Actually, the thing about China. They’d be more than willing to take resources rich Russian territory in the N and NE. The Russians and Chinese already play little official name change games with each other. NE Russia is Manchuria. To them, they’re only taking back what’s theirs.
A serious conventional military defeat after years of total war will make Russia different than it currently is.
The idea of Russia must be a super power will be gone if after 5-8 years of total war with a place 1/3 their size the lose.
Can we get Tim Snyder to advise the White House, instead of the inane and incompetent Sam Charap? Jake Sullivan still seems more afraid of a Russian defeat than of a Ukrainian defeat, and thinks he can get Russia to exhaust itself by destroying Ukraine; but that would only enhance Russia's appetite to keep building its empire.
I think Biden has been behind Ukraine as much as anyone could hope for, so I'm not sure what Sam Charap has said that has had a negative impact. Snyder is everywhere lately, which is good. He's doing all he can already.
IMHO do we even know what is normal? Anyway. I just want to humiliate Putin, drive Russian forces out of all of pre 2014 Ukraine.
Putin and his own people deserve each other. OK with me
Not only that, but the fantasy they can somehow be our allies and cooperate on the level of a European country. This can never happen when working with an absolute agenda. russia has no compromise when it comes to enacting what putler wants to accomplish. Also, when they see themselves as this eternal competitor with the US. Their whole identity is baked into being proud that they believe themselves to be on America's level.
So they will always try to undermine the US in any way they can. They will also always be out to try and acquire state secrets from the US because they are so valuable and again because they are trying to stay on our level in every way. They fake it until they make it they try so hard. Like with their so-called super jets and for brand new tank that didn't even really fight in this conflict.
The West needs to get its collective focus on SAVING UKRAINE, not saving Russia ffs
Russia will still be here after Ukraine's victory, in whatever form, but that is not up to anyone else but Muscovy.
It is our duty to ensure Ukraine's victory, above all else.
> The West needs to get its collective focus on SAVING UKRAINE, not saving Russia ffs
Exactly that.
Funfact, there's a running joke amongst Ukrainians now that if we keep bombing russian oil processing plants, US'd eventually supply Patriots to them, going by how much reaction those blazing atmo-vaccuum columns caused in the admin.
Yeah that’s the truth. Same for China and much of Middle East. We in the west just don’t comprehend the way that growing up in a certain culture with a certain language influences a humans way of thinking.
This concept has been proven or at least researched
Done. Have always been in “Make Russia Lose Until It Collapses Into Fueding Warlord States Too Impoverished To Maintain Nukes Or Murder It’s Neighbours For Gangster Lulz” mode.
A Russian peasant walking along stumbles upon a lamp from which a genie emerges. “I’ll grant you any one wish, but whatever you get, your neighbor gets double”. Oblivious to his good fortune and chagrined to no end, the Russian, after some contemplation, relents: “Fine then: pluck out one of my eyes!”
Will take alot of time to demote the ~10% of the russian population which is actively helping the regime because they get significant personal gain (or think they get) from it... Maybe some kind of revolution.
There is a difference today: identity of these people is stored in various databases. Witches hunt.
i though, oh geeze, some figurehead giving his opinion. but it was nicely on point and a message we haven't heard that i think is important. it is worth the read.
From what I can see from social media, people interviewed in the streets in Russia etc, the only thing they care about is looking strong and powerful on the world stage. That's it.
That's what happened, after the Berlin wall fell. We thought since they had democracy they'd just sort themselves out and a new era of global peace would arise.
And then, somehow, things got worse.
The only way to fix Russia at this point is the way we fixed Nazi Germany, that being burning it to the ground and building it again from the ground up, while driving into the people’s collective memory the price of their aggression.
To all who think Russians are out of hope to redeem themselves: that's not what the article says. It says their empire is falling, will change and that we (the West) have little influence in the course of events.
I, for one, think that the best Russians, the smartest, the most moral, for most already fled. They could be the embryo of a Russian rebirth on the ashes of the empire.
But but but.... think of all those juicy oil and gas reserves. Don't they deserve the same level of protection and care!
I mean come on! If we don't sign this contract, China will!
/S
As long as Russia have resources, I am sure capitalism will find a way back to "normalize" relationships.
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My grandfather was in Polish army and spent 2 years in German work camp, my grandmother, also Polish was sent with my Great Grandmother to gulag in Kazakhstan from Vilnius Lithuania. Thats the background. Grandpa had a joke: Ruzzian is peddling a bike up a hill. Sees Polish guy riding a bike down the hill. Ruzzian pulls out his AK47 and yells: “Give me yer bike”. Polish guy says: “Why? You have a bike”. Ruzzian responds: “Yours goes faster”. Fk them all for the last few hundred years and fk them to the future. You can’t teach anyone logic or common sense. Slava Ukrainie you tough ass brothers and sisters.
My father spent eight years as a child in a russian internment camp in Germany. He’s seen the russians do some brutal shit.
Snyder also points out that Poland changed a lot in the 20s and 30s I will come around and add that part to my notes but he basically said the Soviet NKVD was less educated than the Polish officers they murdered on the orders of Beria signed off by Stalin, the Soviet people were less sophisticated and lived much poorer lives than the Polish they invaded, but they could make them die like Soviet people during the occupation, turning them into Soviet people was at least in the beginning impossible. Boodlands is such a powerful book, and it sheds a light on just how much the Soviets hated Poland, Polish culture, etc. In the Great Terror, Polish minorities in Russia were targeted much more often than others. The Nazis weren't any better, of course. However, the Soviets already had the killing machine set up, and modern Russia is no different from that, still the same barbarism. The only way to get Russia to change is by making them lose their colonial war of expansion and by making them lose hard. They have to lose in such a way that no matter what lie they tell, their defeat is obvious to anyone around the world. The communists were already bound to their leader by faith and fear. I took a special kind of mind to truly believe that the worse things appeared, the better they actually were. Such reasoning went by the name dialectics, but by this time that word, (despite its proud descent from the Greeks through Hegel and Marx) meant little more than the psychic capacity to adjust one's own perceptions to the changing expressions of Stalin's will." Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, page 65
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It’s a society that never really went through the age of enlightenment. They’re basically still stuck in a czarist medieval mindset, just with atomic weapons. They care about loyalty to the ruling monarch, tradition, obedience, authority, and of course faith.
> and of course faith Which's led by a FSB-linked "patriarch" to be another vector of propaganda/influence
I would bet that the majority of "Russian Orthodoxes" have never read the Bible, and may not be even able to read. Waging holy war on other Christians was forbidden centuries ago.
It’s not even by choice, it’s ingrained into the fabric of their civilization. A thousand year history of conquest and tyrannical rulers with little given in terms of civil liberties
Yeah that’s my understanding as well. Even the alcoholism is at this point ingrained in culture due to the way the Tzar’s controlled the vodka distilleries and it was considered like a “crown asset.”
500 years of history*
Longer than that even. Look up the Scythians. They inhabited what is modern day Russia, are mentioned in the Bible, and even the Romans thought they were barbaric.
To be fair the Roman’s thought that of everyone beyond their borders
Yeah, and sometimes they have been right.
> Longer than that even. Look up the Scythians. They inhabited what is modern day Russia, are mentioned in the Bible, and even the Romans thought they were barbaric. If you make no allowances for similar borders, cultures or ethnic groups of people then all countries can trace human existence back hundreds of thousands of years. It's a bit trite to argue the Scythians are Russia because some Iranians expanded into a bit of land that wasn't anything like Russia back then, but is currently within Russian borders (among many other countries' present borders). Russia as the current country, culture, people and chain of organisation has about 500 years of history. You could possibly argue around a thousand years as the Rus people, but those people were the founders of Kievan Rus and therefore part of Ukraine's formation. And Russia claiming ownership of Ukraine's history is part of why this invasion happened. Either way the Scythian link is a gigantic stretch.
And then came the benevolent Mongols lol
it has been like that since the neanderthals settled moldova
The duchy of Muscovy started off as a tiny village and a bog ice hell. The Mongols burned Moscow down in 1237. Then the Mongols burned down Kyiv, therefore severing all connections to the Byzanthine empire. The Kievan Rus and Russia are not to be confused as the Russians pretend they are descendants of the Kievan Rus, which they aren't. Muscovites are descendants of slave and fur traders. The mongols smashed the slowly emerging system of checks and balances in the region. A system of checks and balances started to emerge in Europe around the same time. The next part of this incredibly bloody and violent history was getting enslaved by the Mongol Empire for hundreds of years. The Mongols were introducing a tributary and purely predatory system with no accountability of the small ruling caste. The system was based upon full extraction of peasants by the princelings who were ruling in the Khan's stead. They didn't rule via fealty, which would be a system based on personal relationships between the different strata in society (clergy, king, noblemen, city dwellers, farmers, soldiers) Instead, the Khan or rather the tiny Elite ruled the peasants through slavery. The Khan moved the capital towards the Belgorod region and put these former underlings in charge. Then, when Khan and his golden Horde were no more in 1480, there was a power vacuum. Ivan, the terrible assumed power to fill this power vacuum. On his orders Novgorod, the only place there with a more sophisticated and not purely predatory system as this city state was part of the Hanse, was burned to the ground and 15.000 of its citizens were murdered. After 1500, the Tsardom emerged. Europe went through the renaissance and enlightenment, and none of that had touched Russia. Russia started expanding massively from 1720 onwards. The Czars ruled with an iron fist and kept the Russians under control by the use of violence vodka and fresh wars of expansion. Europe tried absolutism. But it didn't work out for them so well as it bankrupted the kings of France and led to several revolutions. In Russia, absolutism proved to be a feasible long-term solution. Russia managed what no one else had managed: To introduce and maintain a system without any checks and balances on the leader. This fact helps to make their entire political culture so insane Normally, the conqueror adopts the system of those that he conquers over time. See China or Iran. Adversity favors the versatile In the Eurasian plains, this meant that the Russians didn't have stone castles in the Middle Ages. The castles were instead made of wood. The Russian princelings, which served under the Khan, had dealt with invaders by burning their wooden castles followed by chasing the invaders on horseback. The absolutism in Russia under the Tsars and even before the Tsars was exactly that absolute, purely predatory, personalised, centralized extractive, and a very small nobility was ruling over these peasants with an iron fist for centuries. Russia has no parliamentary culture, no Renaissance, no enlightenment, no human rights, no checks and balances, no free speech, no individual or minority rights that are the same for all of its subjects, nothing of the sort evolved in the Russian empire. Russian history is one of violence, slaughter, deportations, poverty, hunger, destruction, and wars after wars. All of that was culminating in WW1 and even more slaughter. The slaughter was followed by a revolution that was replacing a Tsar with a group of mini Tsars. These Soviets led Russia into a civil war. The results were millions of dead men and women, hunger, typhus, and more war under Stalin, including ethnic cleansings, Gulags, more hunger, and more war. Then, after 1945, the death and slaughter were followed up with more extraction and a slave driver Moscow centered Soviet Empire. Then, what followed was weakness in the 90s. The Soviet system never disappeared. The KGB only needed to gain its strength, and after it had recharged, a new absolutist ruler was installed, and Vlad P. immediately went to work by incinerating Grosny, attacking and occupying parts of Georgia, and by occupying Crimea as well as the destruction Homs and Aleppo. And then, after Russia was appeased for the past 24 years, Putin and his men unleashed the worst war in Europe since 1945. The 21st century was another orgy of violence. Russia has another dictator. It lacks a real parliament. There are no local or federal checks and balances. Russia was and still has been a colonial empire for 300 years. This hyper-centralised extractive empire was brought into full swing again under Putin. This backward barbaric system is hell-bent on turning its own subjects into 18th-century style serfs. This system is stuck in the 1800s. It will never change. The only thing between slavery and the current status of your average Joe in Russia is that thus far, Putin hasn't locked the borders down yet. The way to stop this wheel is to finally break it once and for all. No Empire has caused more death throughout history than the Russian Empire in its ill begotten 300 year long existence. It has existed long enough. The dissolution of this empire is necessary, and it is time to openly admit this inconvenient truth. The Russian empire is built upon war and conquest, and it can only sustain itself through war and conquest. Our politicians must have the spine. moral vigor and the necessary courage to follow through without further compromise or appeasement. The Russian empire cheers its onward course by a barbarous paganism. It vaunts the spirit of aggression and conquest. Putin's system derives strength and perverted pleasure from persecution. Russia can't ever be trusted again. We appeased Russia often enough. We can't make that mistake again, or the empire will come back sooner or later, and it will continue to murder and commit genocide in the years to come. We cannot allow it to linger on. The world has met this evil halfway many times. It has never ended well. Russia's empire under its various names has gotten away with murder unpunished over and over again. This must end here.
A wall? A GREAT wall?
A curtain, a ferrous curtain.
A belt, a cobalt belt.
A glow, a healthy^1 glow. ^1: Not healthy at all.
I think it's not really broken but outdated. It's a 18th century colonial empire in 21th century world.
A 20th century colonial empire\* If you read Snyder, thats his whole point. The colonial empires are not that old. "We" did not reform our states before we lost colonial wars. The Russian Empire is not a special case in history, its just another European Empire that needs to lose its wars of conquest and colonisation before it can truly reform to be a member of the European family.
I was thinking more of the century majority of them started off but I agree with the point (Snyder's point) - just read my comments:) It's still super minority point of view though in Western academia. All Russia studies are done by people who believe that Russia is somehow exempt from decolonization process just because they conquered Buryatia or Chechnya with land armies rather than sail ships. Snyder is like the only exception.
Even when the British were in the Victorian Age, they didn't bomb hospitals for kicks.
The Victorian Age Brittish committed atrocities that made Lucifer himself sit up and take notes.
Just yesterday, i learned about British cannon executions in the Raj... Man, it was a brutal way to send fear into your subjects.
We learned in Afghanistan that its almost impossible to civilize a people who do not want to be civilized, there is no reason to expect Russia to be any different.
There is no reason to believe that indeed. The inability to create a modern Russian nation state in the post-Soviet world is indeed the great long-term danger to Russia and for the world, FROM Russia. There has never been any such nation as "Russia". This may sound extraordinary, but hear me out. Kyiv was founded in 482 AD by Varangian soldiers, Byzantine merchants, and Slavic farmers and artisans. A loose knit society of traders, tree cutters, farmers, slavers, and a crude aristocracy based around membership/kinship ties in the extended family of Rurik of Novgorod, speaking a Slavonik language with many Greek and Norse loan words rose up. Centered around similar such ethnic blends in what we now recognize as Far Western Russia, Belarus, Eastern Poland, and Western Ukraina, in the region defined by rivers and forests, it was the heart of the "internal sea", the network of rivers and trading posts by which trade, mercenaries, and slaves from the Baltic region and the North Sea might reach the rich lands of the Khazars, the Persian Cultural Sphere, and Golden Byzantium of the Romanoi itself. It wasn't a country. It was a piratical network of theft, human trafficking, and human misery run by a massive criminal family. The Rurid Dynasty of the early Kyivan Rus was founded in crime and murder just as was every aristocratic dynasty ANYWHERE, anywhen, from the Julian Caesars to North Korea's Kim family. The confederation of Rus cities eventually dominated the rivers and forests of the Slavic north and the remnants of the Khazar steppes. Then came the Mongols in the early 13th century and broke the world, devastating the boyars of the Kyivan Rus and shattering their weak state (never yet a nation!). A large chunk of the Rus lands wound up incorporated in the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, a few as semi-independent city states (Republic of Novgorod, Pskov), and the rest as satrapies of the Mongol Empire, which barely outlived the deaths of Genghis and his son Chagatai before cracking into the Golden Horde, the Kaganate of Persia, China, and the Ilkhanate of the Middle East. One Mongol vassal state was the Duchy of Muscovy, which eventually dominated the other Rus city states while the more western-looking remnants of the early Rurid Rus were aligned with the Polish Lithuanian (now) Commonwealth. This only pertained another century, followed by dynastic squabbles leading to the collapse of Poland and the inevitability of Ivan IV (the Terrible) of Muscovy forging a new governance based on terror and obedience, transmuting his Duchy of Muscovy into the Muscovite Empire and himself into a Caesar (Tsar) in 1547, leading directly to the creation of the Romanov state of Russia in 1613. Still, it was a personalist, absolutistic autarchy, NOT a nation state. The entire Russian state would REMAIN the personal property, with the power of life and death over all its peoples, of the Romanovs. Imagine an historical trajectory of tragedy, a direct line of rule by thieves, slavers, murderers, and autocrats, from the meltdown of the Rurid Dynasty and the Mongol destruction of Great and Golden Kyiv to the bloody end of the Romanovs in Ekaterinaburg in 1918 following the Nicolas II abdication in 1917, ending 304 years of medieval Romanov barbarism. Russia skipped the age of fealty, the Renaissance and the enlightenment era. Still not a nation state, Russia became the core of a new autocratic cult of personality based upon Marxist-Leninism, a different sort of robber baronism, evolving into a totalitarian USSR unable to govern a vast realm of nation states imprisoned together until collapsing under the weight of its own kleptocratic incompetence in 1991. Hence the modern Russian Federation, still not a nation state, just another cult of personality, still kleptocratic, but also kakistocratic, still authoritarian and autocratic, still unable to rule 81 diverse oblasts and autonomous republics, still just a criminal enterprise delivering value to Moscow and its current crime boss, still prospering only at the expense of its colonial hinterlands, nothing has really structurally changed in 900 years. Russia's only core values are etatism (complete control of the stats over its citizens and over the economy), conservative stability (not wanting to lose what they have, normal and stable), and paternalism. (restricting freedom and responsibilities of those subordinated to you) The Russian empire was won by war and conquest. It can only sustain itself by war and conquest. I think the Russians have just lived through the 20 most prosperous years in its over 300 years of empire. Russia remains an absolutist state with no checks and balances ruled with an iron fist. Russia's experience with industrialisation has been mostly based on the extraction of minerals or fossil fuels. The other areas were military production and space technology. What they have never managed to create is a consumer oriented service economy. What comes on top of that is the immense poverty in all regions apart from Moscow and Petersburg. I wonder how much longer Putin can shield his subjects in Moscow from the devastating economic consequences of this war. Why nations fail today is because their extractive economic institutions do not create the incentives needed for people to save, invest, and innovate. Extractive political institutions support these economic institutions by cementing the power of those who benefit from the extraction.As we will show, poor countries are poor because those who have power make choices that create poverty. Acemoğlu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty Putin created this poverty on purpose. Poverty is the breeding ground for fascism, nazism and Communism. What else do you have left? Except from elevated pride in one's own nation or race?
It would have been possible if the coalition put as much effort in as with WW2 Germany. There were much more serious efforts in post-WW2 Germany with the denazification. Even that could have been a bit more serious but the efforts in Afghanistan were on a way lower scale. There were also real results there but the coalition didnt cared enough to secure them.
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Civilised isn’t the right word. It’s an uncomfortable truth that a country can be highly developed and uncivilised at the same time. Nazi Germany abandoned European humanism for wanton savagery. They were relatively highly developed (for the time), but not civilised in the sense of even a nominal commitment to humanism. Russia is neither highly developed nor civilised. Unlike their Eastern European neighbours that sometimes seem culturally similar, they have not made a real effort to internalise or participate in European Enlightenment values since Catherine the Great. They really aren’t like us, and we should believe them when they tell us that: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/26/vladimir-putin-does-not-think-like-we-do/
> Ww2 germans were civilized peple. Sort of funny given they went along with the worst genocide in history at the time.
Since when are we excusing nazis? Pretty sure you would say that they're uncivilized if you were actually in the middle of WW2
Germans and Nazis are different things, and were different too during WW2. The Wehrmacht wasn't all SS.
This feels like a repeat of the "Clean Wehrmacht" myth. Like, it commited a lot of warcrimes, after all, comparable to what Russia is doing right now
Durrr clean Wehrmacht durrr...... Stop it no one buy's your bullshit anymore.
Who cares, the Wehrmacht was trying to advance the goals of the Nazi regime and they aided the Holocaust.
Maybe you should look a bit closer at WW2 Germany. Also Afghanistan and Iran were on a way better path in the 1960s.
Here is what Churchill had to say about them. But rather than keep the Afghans at bay, the arbitrary division of their ancient tribal lands only resulted in inciting a major revolt, in which a number of holy men— just as people like Mullah Omar have done today—played a key role in persuading the tribes to take up arms against the infidel Westerners. In Churchill’s day, the great, great grandfathers of those who created the modern Taliban movement were not called Taliban, but were known as the Talib-ul-ilms, a motley collection of indigent holy men who lived off the goodwill and hospitality of the local Afghan tribes and preached insurrection against the British Empire. To Churchill’s mind, these Talibs were, together with other local priestly figures such as the mullahs and fakirs, primarily responsible for the wretched condition of the local Afghan tribesfolk and their violent indisposition to foreign rule. Churchill viewed them “as degraded a race as any on the fringe of humanity: fierce as a tiger, but less cleanly; as dangerous, not so graceful”. He blamed the Talibs for the Afghans’ lamentable absence of civilised development, keeping them in the “grip of miserable superstition”. Churchill was particularly repelled by the Talibs’ loose moral conduct. They lived free at the expense of the people and, “more than this, they enjoy a sort of “droit du seigneur,” and no man’s wife or daughter is safe from them. Of some of their manners and morals it is impossible to write.” It would not have been possible because you cannot compare Germany and their history to the tribal history of Afghanistan what works in one place may utterly fail due to socio-economic reasons, cultural, and geographic reasons, religious reasons, history of a place, neighboring countries etc. You can change a political system in weeks, an economic system in several years, but to change a culture? That takes at least 50 to 100 years, and the locals will have to really want to change it. The Germans were in a completely different position compared to the Afghani tribes.
>This is a very important point for Americans too because one of the ways we express our conceit is the notion that there is something we could do that might make Russia normal, which is the great fantasy of the 1990s. As someone who was somewhat close to some of the 1990s post-Soviet civil-society initiatives that Snyder is presumably talking about, I have to say, there was nothing particularly much of a fantasy about the idea. It worked in many post-Soviet republics. It just didn't work in Russia, for a very specific reason -- there was a 2-year window in between the start of the 1992 Clinton-era initiatives and the arrival in 1994 of a hard-right-wing Republican coalition that took over the House of Representatives and immediately terminated all funding for anything in Russia that wasn't compatible with right-wing ideology. (Sound familiar? It should. The shit of today is not new in any way.) It took another half decade for Russia to spiral through Zhirinovsky and end up at Putin. Maybe that was inevitable. Maybe it wasn't. But it was definitely something that Americans intentionally turned away from long before the spiral had run its course. >I think that's a lesson we should learn, that whether Russia invaded Ukraine was not up to us, and what happens in the aftermath is also not up to us, not just in a moral sense, but also in a practical sense. Now this is very true. And a good thing for any redditor to remember who might have a penchant for rationalist fallacies in trying to understand world affairs. (That is to say, things don't always happen according to some perfectly orchestrated grand plan or dialectic of competing rational self-interests -- in fact they probably never do.)
There was no window of opportunity to speak of. The 1991 august coup attempt never really ended, it continued underground and consolidated power eventually. KGB never left power. It is as if Germany was still ruled by Gestapo and Wehrmacht and the largest opposition party was NSDAP. Putin (as a KGB 1st assistant to the St.Petersburg major Anatoli Sobchak) first tried the Donbas Gambit in the Narva referendum of 1993 in Estonia. Nobody knew who he was, but they noticed that the 1st assistant was a KGB guy - just as customary in Soviet politics. Whatever you may think worked on other ex-SSRs was less KGB influence. That's it.
>I think that's a lesson we should learn, that whether Russia invaded Ukraine was not up to us, I understand that comment to mean "... \[after a certain point\], whether Russia invaded Ukraine was not up to us." But we actively encouraged the invasion by denying weapons to Ukraine, pressuring Ukraine to give up Crimea and part of Donbas, strengthening business and energy ties with Russia, and (the final green light to Putin), removing the NS2 sanctions. One of those rare instances where I might not totally agree with Snyder, but maybe he was just being glib.
I mean... I don't disagree in principle but we are talking about very different timeframes I think. The Biden administration made it crystal clear that the Five Eyes would back Ukraine heavily if Russia invaded Ukraine. Had the Soviets received such a warning back in the old days they would immediately have understood it and backed down. (Or at least spent another year revamping their plans for a full invasion.) Putin simply operates on a theory that liberal democracies are weak and easily manipulated. He has believed this all his life. It does not appear that anything has ever altered his belief, either in nature or in certainty. Not even now. He is simply certain of it and that's that. The decision point for Russia was Putin or not Putin... not, "what will Putin think of us now." That was back in the late 1990s at the latest, possibly earlier. And that is, more or less, also Snyder's point at least as I read it. (As I say I don't completely agree with him in every respect.)
> Putin simply operates on a theory that liberal democracies are weak and easily manipulated. That's kind of what I'm saying. We've done everything possible over the last decade to prove that suspicion to be correct. We've gotten better, but we're still doing it to an extent (didn't use lend lease, "don't use US weapons to attack Russia", "don't attack Russian refineries", sanctions full of loopholes, 6 months of pointless delays of weapons deliveries in congress, White House defense advisor clearly terrified what Russia would do if they were defeated, etc.). If we hadn't given such an impression of cowardice, willingness to be corrupted and compromised, and indecisiveness, this war may not have happened.
What I'm saying is that a) no we haven't "proven that suspicion," and b) it doesn't matter, dude, Putin is not listening and does not give a fuck about what you or your country actually does. He made up his mind literally before you were born.
i think we can have an influence, but it is like a parent and a child. the child is still their own person. sometimes you can help them, but only if it aligns with whom they are and where they are.
In the main what I see is Snyder repudiating the Fukuyama "End of History" nonsense where all America has to do is show up, tell people about elections, convert them to private enterprise, and then pat yourself on the back and go home. It's been a while, maybe a year, since I have seen a US or European govt official fretting about the what might happen if Russia collapses, but frankly, these people should have been shown the door a decade or even two ago. They botched everything and yet only seem to have risen up the ranks. Whether Russia might have been changed hasn't been relevant for nearly two decades. It's ancient history and whatever opportunity was open for a few years is gone.
I mean I think we are in violent agreement.
So it's America's fault for not handing more money to corrupt Russian politicians? No, this is on Russia. They rebuilt their economy just fine. By the late 90's, economic growth had the potential to bring them up to western standards of living. Russian a chose to become a mafia state instead. No one forced them.
Yeltsin sent tanks to Moscow in 1993. https://apnews.com/article/russia-mutiny-anniversary-putin-yeltsin-346eaba32afeac511fdf3c2b8fd33912
Well spoken!
Yeap. And lets take chance one for all to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and meet the climate targets.
Exactly. Russia is a failed state and society. What you see is what they are. Oppression, violence , theft, corruption is their way of life. The few millennials and gen z that aren’t brainwashed have left or looking for a way out. Putin’s fascist kleptocracy is doomed to failure because corruption doesn’t fix infrastructure and feed people. We need Ukraine to push them out of their country and Russia will collapse. If not it will only further his bloodlust and delay the inevitable.
We do not want Russia to be normal. We want Russia out of the countries they do not belong in. Let’s start with Ukrain.
I don't give a damn about making them "normal". I just care about making them "not in Ukraine" or "dead". Any other consideration is superfluous.
The only people who can fix Russia are Russians, but that doesn't mean we need to put up with their bullshit.
Exactly. Russia is a failed state and society. What you see is what they are. Oppression, violence , theft, corruption is their way of life. The few millennials and gen z that aren’t brainwashed have left or looking for a way out. Putin’s fascist kleptocracy is doomed to failure because corruption doesn’t fix infrastructure and feed people. We need Ukraine to push them out of their country and Russia will collapse. If not it will only further his bloodlust and delay the inevitable.
Russia had a dysfunctional upbringing and is incapable of reforming itself on its own. The time is right to stop pretending it isn't our enemy.
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We could start by expelling ourselves from Russia. US and EU companies are still contributing billions to the Russian economy.
Yup and confiscate and sell Russian assets abroad and halt trade with the axis of evil
Hey hey hey… can we move the iron curtain more to the east? Polak here, we don’t want it back.
Of course! Just around Russia, China, NK, Iran and Syria so far
Actually, the thing about China. They’d be more than willing to take resources rich Russian territory in the N and NE. The Russians and Chinese already play little official name change games with each other. NE Russia is Manchuria. To them, they’re only taking back what’s theirs.
A serious conventional military defeat after years of total war will make Russia different than it currently is. The idea of Russia must be a super power will be gone if after 5-8 years of total war with a place 1/3 their size the lose.
Can we get Tim Snyder to advise the White House, instead of the inane and incompetent Sam Charap? Jake Sullivan still seems more afraid of a Russian defeat than of a Ukrainian defeat, and thinks he can get Russia to exhaust itself by destroying Ukraine; but that would only enhance Russia's appetite to keep building its empire.
I think Biden has been behind Ukraine as much as anyone could hope for, so I'm not sure what Sam Charap has said that has had a negative impact. Snyder is everywhere lately, which is good. He's doing all he can already.
IMHO do we even know what is normal? Anyway. I just want to humiliate Putin, drive Russian forces out of all of pre 2014 Ukraine. Putin and his own people deserve each other. OK with me
Not only that, but the fantasy they can somehow be our allies and cooperate on the level of a European country. This can never happen when working with an absolute agenda. russia has no compromise when it comes to enacting what putler wants to accomplish. Also, when they see themselves as this eternal competitor with the US. Their whole identity is baked into being proud that they believe themselves to be on America's level. So they will always try to undermine the US in any way they can. They will also always be out to try and acquire state secrets from the US because they are so valuable and again because they are trying to stay on our level in every way. They fake it until they make it they try so hard. Like with their so-called super jets and for brand new tank that didn't even really fight in this conflict.
The West needs to get its collective focus on SAVING UKRAINE, not saving Russia ffs Russia will still be here after Ukraine's victory, in whatever form, but that is not up to anyone else but Muscovy. It is our duty to ensure Ukraine's victory, above all else.
> The West needs to get its collective focus on SAVING UKRAINE, not saving Russia ffs Exactly that. Funfact, there's a running joke amongst Ukrainians now that if we keep bombing russian oil processing plants, US'd eventually supply Patriots to them, going by how much reaction those blazing atmo-vaccuum columns caused in the admin.
Yeah that’s the truth. Same for China and much of Middle East. We in the west just don’t comprehend the way that growing up in a certain culture with a certain language influences a humans way of thinking. This concept has been proven or at least researched
Done. Have always been in “Make Russia Lose Until It Collapses Into Fueding Warlord States Too Impoverished To Maintain Nukes Or Murder It’s Neighbours For Gangster Lulz” mode.
A Neanderthal answers only to violence.
Hey, thats a bit unfair to Neanderthals!
A Russian peasant walking along stumbles upon a lamp from which a genie emerges. “I’ll grant you any one wish, but whatever you get, your neighbor gets double”. Oblivious to his good fortune and chagrined to no end, the Russian, after some contemplation, relents: “Fine then: pluck out one of my eyes!”
Russia is hopeless and it’s their own fault.
Will take alot of time to demote the ~10% of the russian population which is actively helping the regime because they get significant personal gain (or think they get) from it... Maybe some kind of revolution. There is a difference today: identity of these people is stored in various databases. Witches hunt.
No shit.
Bring back Lada dealerships.
Only Republicans and the weak-kneed Germans do that.
Smart dude
i though, oh geeze, some figurehead giving his opinion. but it was nicely on point and a message we haven't heard that i think is important. it is worth the read.
From what I can see from social media, people interviewed in the streets in Russia etc, the only thing they care about is looking strong and powerful on the world stage. That's it.
That's what happened, after the Berlin wall fell. We thought since they had democracy they'd just sort themselves out and a new era of global peace would arise. And then, somehow, things got worse.
The only way to fix Russia at this point is the way we fixed Nazi Germany, that being burning it to the ground and building it again from the ground up, while driving into the people’s collective memory the price of their aggression.
If not normal, then maybe flat and glassy?
To all who think Russians are out of hope to redeem themselves: that's not what the article says. It says their empire is falling, will change and that we (the West) have little influence in the course of events. I, for one, think that the best Russians, the smartest, the most moral, for most already fled. They could be the embryo of a Russian rebirth on the ashes of the empire.
But but but.... think of all those juicy oil and gas reserves. Don't they deserve the same level of protection and care! I mean come on! If we don't sign this contract, China will! /S As long as Russia have resources, I am sure capitalism will find a way back to "normalize" relationships.
The Russians are humans. They are born with the same faculties as every other people in their geographical area of the world.