Would have been far better in medieval days to put him in the scoop of a trebuchet, set him on fire with a little pitch and fire him into the castle.
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Not as odious or cuntish as Putin.
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Judging by the mood in here, many will disagree, but that’s what I’d do. They have only two alternatives: live under Russian domination in a more or less intact country, or play heroics for a while, suffering big losses on all records, and then live under Russian domination in a devastated country, thrown back decades in terms of infrastructures.
But of course, the Ukrainian president sees himself in one of his TV series, and plays out the heroic shiny knight rhetorics (we will fight until the last man etc.)
How widespread is this opinion in Britain? I’ve seen the NATO expansion excuse trotted out elsewhere and the majority of the comments I see in the Greek articles not only espouse it, but take it much further. There are even some idiots who are cheering Putin on because he “took the West to the cleaners”.
It drives me up the wall.
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If that’s the case, I can’t even bring myself to read the article. A disgusting attitude.
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NATO expansion eastwards is a reality. Look at a map comparing the 1990 situation with the one today.
Of course, I’ll reiterate that it shouldn’t serve as an excuse to invade a neighbouring country. But if you provoke and destabilize a big beast like Russia over decades, it might eventually become angry.
The current situation is the result of a long ongoing process, started thirty years ago, and littered with a lot of errors along the way.
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Why have no sanctions been imposed on Belarus? They are complicit in this nightmare.
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Just listened to a guy interviewed, his Ukrainian family will fight no matter what.
Read the link…
Amonsgt the corbynite left, its prevelent and the brexity right (Ukippers Farage and Daubney ) but i think for the majority of people across the middle its not.
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I am trying to report on events as I see them. You don’t have to read. I don’t get why you are so hostile.
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Belarus is already subject to significant sanctions. At this point, I would say Belarus’ independence is a legal fiction. One of the less-reported announcements is that Russian forces will be based in Belarus indefinitely, with some bases being turned over for permanent occupation. Belarus is more than complicit, an attack helicopter shot down near Kyiv today is from Belarus.
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Yeah, the ‘Russian bear’ analogy comes to mind quite easily, and these points are valid. However, it’s also a fact that NATO (built at the time to keep Soviet Russia in check) allowed itself to expand eastwards while maintaining Russia out ‘of the club’, at a moment when they would happily have been a part of it.
That discussion was held already earlier in the thread, but imo, the eventual emergence of Putin as saviour of the nation was facilitated by the nasty and imbecilic way how the Western countries treated Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Now, thirty years later, we pay the price for it.
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That’s a bit too much. The west could have given more money, but after a while a country with the resources and size of Russian needs to look after itself a bit. More money would have probably just ended up lining the pockets of the Russians already picking through the bones.
Would Russia have joined NATO at any point in the past?
Don’t stress. The Beeb, CNN, Al Jazeerah and even Russia Today has been on my TV all day. To a man, it’s basically been talking heads, a few breakaways to reporters in Ukraine and some updates but very little in the way of being able to develop a sense of what is happening.
Your updates, while raw and unfiltered except by yourself, is providing much more depth of field. Keep em coming.
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I don’t want to dig into this too far, but at what point would Russia have been happy to be part of NATO? So much that the common folk were not privy to when it comes to international policies, but I cannot think of a time when the Russians have been aligned with “the west” in any major political issues going back to the first Gulf War? Haven’t they consistently been funneling arms to the rogue states and insurgencies all these years?
Frankly, I think that is a crock, post-hoc Russian grievance manufacturing. The West is somehow blamed for the fiasco that was Russian privatization and the ‘rape of the Russian economy’, when the facts are that Russia largely ignored Western advice, shut Western interests out, all in the name of allowing the Communist kleptocracy to reinvent itself as the Russian oligarchy. Who in the West made off with all that wealth? Much is made of that Pepsi deal for Soviet navy ships, but the facts are that it collapsed after one tranche, and most of the ships involved were scrapped anyway.
You need only look at some of Sach’s work from the 90s to see how the Russian transition was viewed - headed the wrong way from the start.
I am not sure how the Yeltsin government could have been treated differently - flawed as it was, it was the closest to a legitimately elected Russian government as had been seen in a century.
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Well, that’s what they did in the end, didn’t they? Putin restored Russia’s economy after the clusterfuck of the Yeltsin period, the ressources were bound to the state again and he destroyed the mafias which were leeching the country. Then, he instated his own mafia, but that is another topic.
My point was that instead of declaring Russia a friend and helping them substantially (i.e. like the US did for Germany after WW2), they let them fall into pieces, absorved a huge bulk of the former Warsaw pact states into NATO, did nothing to favour stability or democracy in Russia, while allowing their multinational companies to make profit by cooperating with said mafias.
Anyway, that was 25-30 years ago. I’m not disputing the fact that Putin has now become dangerous and should be kept in check by severe sanctions against him and his cronies.