Of course but like you said, at the end of the day it is an excuse. As far as I am aware Ukraine doesn’t even fulfil the induction criteria for NATO as it has been in a state of civil war for the last 8 years.
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VDV at the airport
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it’s incredible what you’re doing. Thanks so much. my family on my mother’s side hails from 100km south of Kiev, going back to the late 1800’s before they got on ships for the new world and ended up settling in northern Alberta. None of us speak the language anymore, but we still honor some of the old holidays like Orthodox Easter with the traditional foods we make with the old recipes handed down.
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Thank you, I am glad it is appreciated.
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I don’t necessarily agree but this is an interesting take
In Russia, this war is not as popular as usual. Attacking a brother country spikes up unrest:
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This is Putin’s spin, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. He didn’t destroy the mafias, he just put his own firmly on top, and brought them to heel. Look at Abramovich’s career arc. Today’s oligarchs are either yesterday’s mafia bosses, or entirely creatures of Putin after he destroyed the original amassers of the wealth.
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In an area occupied
I definitely agree that the 2008 invitation to Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO was a mistake, and was in fact considered as such by the vast majority of NATO. Georgia was an even worse idea than Ukraine. Even more of a provocation, and even more of an overextension.
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The thugs have been deployed now. These are infamous for war crimes wherever they fight:
Not post-hoc as far as I’m concerned. It’s exactly what I felt at the time, when I heard that 100ks of people were suffering from drought and were dying out in the cold.
Here’s an excerpt from an article in French (dating from 2010) looking at the evolution of demographics in Russia between 1897 and now. I’ve copied and pasted the part concerning the nineties:
(…)
The demographic collapse was very rapid, and lasted throughout the 90s, until the second year of Putin’s second term in office, when the demographic plan was put in place, successfully led by the current Russian President Dimitri Medvedev. Between 1990 and 1995, the infant mortality rate rose by 56% and the female mortality rate by 26%. Male life expectancy went from 64 years in 1990 to 57 years in 1995!
A Russian lived less long than an Indonesian or a Peruvian. Female life expectancy dropped from 74 to 70 years. Between 1990 and 1995, the excess of deaths during this period was 3 million inhabitants, i.e. double the excess of deaths due to the difficult living conditions of civilians in Russia during the Second World War. The Russian collapse of 1990-2000 was equivalent to the Ethiopian population collapse during the 1980 famine or pol-pot Cambodia…
This population collapse hit first the old and then the young. The economic collapse hit the Russian hospital system hard. Russia experienced a resurgence of diseases that no longer even existed in many countries of the 1/3 world: diphtheria, typhus, cholera, typhoid fever…
Above all, tuberculosis hit the population hard. In 1995, it was estimated that one in ten prisoners was affected by this illness. Each year, according to the Harvard Institute of Statistics and the New York Institute of Public Health, between 1990 and 1996, Russian prisons released 30,000 active strain carriers and 300,000 dormant strain carriers. If nothing had been done, 12% of the country’s population would have been infected in 2005.
Between 1990 and 1998, sexually transmitted diseases skyrocketed. The number of recorded syphilis rose from 8,000 to almost 400,000. AIDS literally exploded in him and the leader of Russian epidemiology estimated that at the rate of the 90s, 10 million people would be infected in 2005 (Note from Alexandre Latsa: it is estimated in 2009 that 500,000 people would be carriers of the AIDS virus) . This explosion of AIDS was also largely due to drugs. In 1998, the number of drug addicts in the country was estimated at 5 million (3% of the population), this figure having since been “halved”.
While the young people used drugs, the older ones drank. A 1998 survey showed that 50% of men drank on average more than ½ liter of vodka per day. Between 30,000 and 40,000 people die each year from adulterated vodka. Between 1990 and 1998 alone, there were 259,000 suicides, 230,000 deaths from poisoning (from vodka), and 169,000 murders.
But above all, as more and more Russians died, above all, fewer and fewer were born. At the end of the 1990s, there were 3 million abortions per year in Russia, for 1 million births. But the actual number of abortions was 5 or 6 times higher. The main Russian statistical institute estimated that at the end of the 1990s, more than one in three adult women was sterile and one in two had disorders of the reproductive system. This lack of female birth rate was increased by the increase in prostitution, in Russia but also abroad. The very high emigration of men abroad was largely followed by the high number of women who became (by force or necessity) sexual slaves, especially in Western Europe.
The children who were born, however, hadn’t won everything. In 1993, out of 1.6 million births, 5% of born children were abandoned by their parents. In 1998, there were 1.3 million births and a dropout rate of 9%. In 1998, 1 million children wandered the streets. Finally, the last wars dealt a blow to the young male generation, especially the first war in Chechnya in 1995, where thousands of very young conscripts were sent to slaughter.
All this led to a relentless demographic decline. Russia lost 7 million inhabitants in less than 20 years. The cruising speed of the disappearance of the Russian people was slowly launched, at about 400,000 citizens less each year. Opposite, the political power, in total decomposition, proved incapable of doing anything. If nothing changes, the number of young people aged 15-24 should be halved in 2015. Such a drop is the only historical example in times of peace.
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La démographie en Russie de 1897 à 2030 - AgoraVox le média citoyen
(Sorry for the approximative English… google translate…)
Maybe only because he doesn’t have the power?
Decapitation operation underway:
That’s likely also why there are para landings behind lines around Kyev. But I can be wrong. Maybe I should not speculate. Fog of war is very foggy.
I am not suggesting that that was not an awful time in Russia, it definitely was. What I am saying is that the allocation of responsibility to the West is a crock, a post hoc grievance assigning blame to the West for what was a Russian folly. Every economist looking at transitions predicted exactly what would happen, by blocking the global market from participating and providing financing services, the realized ‘price’ for state assets would be far below real value, and access to them would fall to whomever could get any access to capital at all in the context of an utterly dysfunctional financial system…i.e. organized crime led by the likes of Abramovich.
All of this was happening in parallel with an astonishingly prosperous time in oil and gas too, so any reasonable transition to private ownership should have been more than capable of seeing improved standards of living for the average Russian. Instead, it saw Chelsea.
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From CNN at the aAntonov airport. Several airports have been taken as I have reported above. Some Ukraine is trying to take back. Fighting ongoing.
Edit: this is the same one that Ukraine is trying to recapture now.
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But who took that decision? None other than Yeltsin and his mafia croonies, who were put in place with the help of the West in order to get rid of Gorbachov.