6 ms·
Russia really is not to be feared. The Ukraine war is a tragedy and I hope it ends soon. But they have no economical & military power to really do any harm th
by wouldbecouldbe 3y ago
Russia really is not to be feared.
The Ukraine war is a tragedy and I hope it ends soon.
But they have no economical & military power to really do any harm the Europe & the US. Putin makes a lot of noise but really can't even win a few km's in Ukraine.
But the real threat is further east. China is slowly building it's empire, and it's a scary one. Taking over parts of Africa. Migrating it's people. Integrating it's tech worldwide. Making the world dependent while building it's own full independence.
- vaylian 3y ago> But they have no economical & military power to really do any harm the Europe & the US. Putin makes a lot of noise but really can't even win a few km's in Ukraine. Let's see how the situation in Avdiivka develops in the next few weeks. Ukraine is reinforcing the area, but it doesn't look good. We've seen plenty of blunders by the russian army. But you should not underestimate your enemy.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoAvdiivka will fall next week. Putin (and the Russian (leaderhsip) culture in general, see Stalin) is this: What are a 100M (of our) people dead if we own Ukraine/Baltics/East Poland/Georgia/... for the next hundreds of years? Stalin had the same blunders, thats priced in, the Red Army had meat wave attacks in WW2 and lost millions, but achived all it's war goals (Poland, Baltics, Eastern Europe including half of Germany - only the US achieved all it's war goals too, everyone else lost, sadly Poland had the biggest loss).
- lm28469 3y ago> What are a 100M (of our) people dead if we own Ukraine/Baltics/East Poland/Georgia/... for the next hundreds of years? The fertility rate more than halved since then, they're not playing with the same cards anymore
- Moldoteck 3y agoyou can just make people poorer and they'll have more childs, that's the lifehack
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoPeople have been steadily getting poorer thanks to inflation eating their stagnating wages combined with skyrocketing consumer and housing prices and the birthrate keeps dropping. Poor people had plenty of kids because they had no standards nor accessible birth control or they come from a conservative religious culture where having kids is the norm. But once people taste the good life, like westerners had it so good a while a ago, they don't want to bring kids in economic conditions worse than before, so the poorer you make them, the less kids they'll have. So to compensate, you don't focus on improving the conditions for the locals to convince them to procreate, but you open the immigration gates to people from poor places with no standards, happy to bring kids in conditions that are way better than what they have in their own country, even though they're worse than the locals had a few decades ago.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoPutin is doing everything to get fertility rate up again [0] [0] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-urges-russians-have-more-kids-says-ethnic-survival-stake-2024-02-15/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/putin-urges-russians-ha...
- secondary_op 3y ago[flagged]
- KingOfCoders 3y ago"The fertility rate more than halved since then, they're not playing with the same cards anymore "
- azangru 3y ago
- secondary_op 3y ago[flagged]
- greedo 3y agoConsidering the USSR partnered with Nazi Germany to invade and split up Poland, yes, the Red Army was definitely the aggressor. There's also a school of thought amongst historians that if Germany hadn't attacked the USSR in 1941, the Soviets would have been prepared to attack Germany.
- secondary_op 3y agoThere is prehistory[1] to Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, and simply labelling Red Army as the aggressor instead of considering political actions of every EU state is injustice to sanity as well as ignoring prehistory of 2022 escalation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov–Ribbentrop_Pact#Backgr...
- greedo 3y agoReally not sure what you're rambling about mixing up the EU with Red Army stuff or "injustice to sanity". Poland had existed for centuries before being dismembered in the 18th Century. Reconstituted after WW1, it was a fully recognized and sovereign country with its own language and culture. The fact that it had the misfortune to lie between Russia and the Hapsburg/Prussian states.
- KingOfCoders 3y agoAs soon as the Ukraine war comes to a standstill, Russia will start riots in the Baltics to create a land connection to Kaliningrad.
- cbg0 3y agoHow exactly will Russia start "riots" in NATO countries?
- The_Colonel 3y agoWith the large Russian minority living there. Just like it started in Donbas.
- thriftwy 3y ago[flagged]
- The_Colonel 3y agoWasn't all of this in Crimea / Donbas? It did not seem to help there.
- thriftwy 3y agoUkraine was busy closing Russian language schools all across country, including Donbass. The inconvenient truth is that such a policy didn't get any serious reversal during the reign of "pro-Russian, Donbass choice" Yanukovich. Nevertheless, Donbass only really went ballistic when the first action of post-Yanukovich Rada was to repeal the "language law" which half-assedly permitted the things I have mentioned in my previous comment.
- ImPostingOnHN 3y ago> Ukraine was busy closing Russian language schools all across country, including Donbass. russia is closing Ukrainian-language schools across Ukraine. Bad or Good? What % of schools in russia are Ukrainian-language and are not closed?
- chinathrow 3y agoYou underestimate how Russia is playing the long game while everyone else thinks in election cycles.
- wruza 3y agoThe natural election cycle is pending though. I want to believe this is his last term.
- cglace 3y agoDoes that involve wrecking their economy and killing hundreds of thousands of males in a rapidly declining population?
- IncreasePosts 3y agoI guess it is easy to avoid the election cycles when you constantly put opponents in jail, or kill them. Why didn't we think of that? And for all the time Putin has to lay out his master plan..what did it buy him? A river of Russian blood in Ukraine?
- Qwertious 3y agoIf Russia was playing the long game then Finland would never have joined NATO.
- lm28469 3y ago> can't even win a few km's in Ukraine. And the US couldn't win against a few thousand goat farmers with Ak47s, or maybe there this is a bit more complex...
- wouldbecouldbe 3y agoThe problem of Afghanistan has never been conquering it, but holding it, the Soviets ran into the same issue. Anyway, the km's really do matter, if people truly fear for a deeper invasion into Europe. I don't think it's a convincing narrative that that's what Putin wants, and also that that's something he could reasonably accomplish. But I do hear it often as a powerful narrative to help Ukraine more, and I understand why, but from my point of view it's not very convincing. At the same time I agree with the sentiment that heavier the losses in Ukraine, the more he will have difficulties in starting similar drama in other countries with large Russian communities.
- tekla 3y agoAs it turns out, glassing an entire country is politically unpopular.
- caekislove 3y agoUnless you're Israel
- cglace 3y agoThe US occupied the country for 20 years. Staying just became unpopular. The US lost about as many troops in 20 years as Russia loses in 2 days of fighting in Ukraine.
- TeaBrain 3y agoThe situation in Ukraine is not very comparable with the US occupation of Afghanistan. The US captured all of the major cities in Afghanistan in a matter of weeks, after which the Taliban were pushed into a sliver of southern Afghanistan and into Pakistan, which borders those Southern regions of Afghanistan. The issue, as the other commenter mentioned, was in holding the territory. This issue of maintaining stability was worsened by how the US both ignored the Taliban's attempts to negotiate early in the occupation and ignored the fact that the Taliban were being harbored in Pakistan (which was considered an ally), allowing the Taliban to regain strength. Had the US targeted objectives in Pakistan in the early 2000s when the Taliban were weak, rather than waiting till 2011, history may have turned out differently.
- xnx 3y agoAny unstable and/or desperate country with nukes is absolutely to be feared.
- gorbachev 3y agoUkrainians, Lithunians, Latvians, Estonians, Finns and Polish would disagree with your first sentence.