- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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This is remarkably unhinged for him, in my opinion.
Read a story a few days ago from French sources that said that when Macron met with Putin he went away thinking this guy is very different from just 3 years ago and is acting totally unhinged. I totally believe it now.
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Feb 21, 2022 20:30
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May 10, 2024 16:28
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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Since I have a feeling that this was a response to a question with the subtext "Russia was more influential economic wise, why do they seem so relevant in history?"
Much of the former iron curtain STILL hasn't recovered their economies from the fall of communism.
https://twitter.com/MaxCRoser/status/957901889500303360
Until it's dissolution the USSR's economy was near that of the US (PPP) and second place nominal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_largest_historical_GDP
The crash and the gradual recovery has resulted in them being lesser of a share of the economy than their heydays. There are countries that seemed to have handled the transition great such as Estonia, but many haven't been so lucky.
Russia unfortunately has gone down a dark path of trying to regain it's glory days instead of modernizing it's economy. Whether that's from a pro or anti Washington consensus.
Should be noted that even among post-USSR states Ukraine has done particularly bad economically since the 1990s. When you are lagging behind an isolated landlocked puppet state like Belarus you've doing pretty badly, and unfortunately that has made them all the more susceptible to Russian invasion.
https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-is-ukraine-such-an-economic-failure?utm_source=url
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Feb 25, 2022 09:30
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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In the long run India cannot join the USA, Australia, Japan in the Quad in opposition to China and still prop up Russia given how Russia is rapidly becoming a Chinese client state. They are going to have to pick a side. But that side is not today it seems.
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Feb 26, 2022 00:03
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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Germany's army has its issues, but its well equipped and trained, I wouldn't say its in complete disrepair.
The German army is “more or less powerless” and can offer only limited support to allies as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization ramps up support for its eastern members following Russia’s attack on Ukraine, Germany’s top army commander said Thursday.
“I wouldn’t have believed that after 41 year of service in peacetime I would have to experience another war,” Lt. Gen. Alfons Mais said in a statement posted on his LinkedIn profile. “And the armed forces that I lead are more or less powerless.”
The U.S. and other allies have long criticized Germany for underspending on defense in the past decade as the country sought to balance the state’s budget while simultaneously ramping up welfare spending.
“We all saw it coming, but we were not able to assert ourselves, to learn and prepare after the aggression on Crimea,” he added.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/russia-ukraine-latest-news/card/GEeWInyxRr9X7WeQpYN8
I'm sure some German goons here can also chime in, but I thought the running joke in Germany has long been that the Polish army could defeat the German army.
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Feb 26, 2022 00:16
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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Would be interesting to know how real-time the intel the U.S. is providing is. The U.S. has probably the one thing more valuable than weapons to the Ukrainians and that's live satellite monitoring of the entire theater. Knowing where Russian columns and troop movements are is potentially a huge advantage for the Ukrainians.
I read a story a few days ago about how the CIA has been privately training Ukrainian special ops forces in Florida for years. Their main concern was that many parts of the Ukrainian security services were compromised by Russian agents, and so they had to be extra careful about isolating the special ops forces that they trained and not passing on any info to the Ukrainians that they didn't want the Russians to know. Wonder the extent to the collaboration now that Ukraine's entire fate is at stake.
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Feb 26, 2022 05:54
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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I think Putin was absolutely certain this would be easy. We joke about his increasing levels of isolation but it really seems as if since covid he's created an environment for himself where he only hears what he wants to hear. Like the talk about how the Ukrainian armed forces should switch sides because their leaders are drug-addicted neo-Nazis. I don't think he would keep repeating that unless he personally believed it was true, as absurd as it seems. He's always wanted to break Ukraine as an independent country and after what happened in Afghanistan with the Taliban, as well as the Western acceptance (or lack of pushback) against his previous military adventures in Eastern Europe he probably thought it would really be as simple as sending in the tanks and having the population come out and cheer them for liberating them from their democratic overlords.
Zelenksy not pulling a Ghani and running away at the first sign of danger was surely a crushing disappointment and I wish I could have seen Putin's face when he heard that news.
As far as the soldiers themselves, it seems that other than Putin, his top generals and kadyrov he told nobody that this would happen, so yeah I'm sure the great majority of the Russian soldiers did not expect to see actual combat. To say they didn't know they were driving into Ukraine after being given the orders to move is a little silly though.
Read a pretty good article about this - nothing shocking, but good to see it reiterated that Putin doesn't use electronics and has surrounded himself by sycophants who only tell him what they want to hear. In addition his personal circle has been getting smaller and smaller over the years and the only people he trusts are his loyalist, hawkish security services who tend to be just as hawkish as him. Meanwhile the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is not even being consulted these days.
quote:Authoritarian states are bedeviled by an inherent contradiction. To stay in power, autocrats desperately seek reliable information on the attitudes of their citizens, elite rivals, and foreign threats. But to avoid opposition, they establish political systems that make quality data exceptionally hard to obtain. Leaders suppress dissent, punish free expression, encourage personal loyalty, and divide their security agencies. They therefore struggle to understand both how their people feel and what other states are planning.
In a personalist autocracy, these problems are even worse. Government officials not only struggle to obtain factual information; they also face strong personal incentives to censor what they find. Consider, for instance, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s behavior before the 2003 Iraq war. Iraqi government records captured by the United States show that he badly underestimated the probability of a U.S. invasion and, in the event of one, expected his troops to put up much greater resistance. That is not because his advisers were (entirely) blind to reality. It is because his underlings—fearful of confronting a dictator famous for violent purges—never challenged his rosy assessments. As the political scientist David Lake has argued, “Saddam was insulated in a cocoon in which little adverse information got through to him and few subordinates dared challenge his preconceived beliefs.”
Perhaps no leader of a major power illustrates these patterns better than Putin. His advisers once held a range of perspectives, especially early during the first decade of this century, when he attempted to position the Kremlin as a partner to the United States and Europe. But over time, his security agencies came to dominate Putin’s attention, especially as he grew disappointed with the West. Now, Putin’s inner circle is almost entirely made up of the siloviki—members of his loyalist, hawkish security services. The FSB, Russia’s successor to the KGB, is playing an increasingly visible role in foreign relations. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, by contrast, is now sometimes left out of decisions altogether.
The result is a dangerous feedback loop. By most accounts, the president’s advisers uniformly see the West as a grave security threat to Russia, which encourages Putin to adopt an increasingly hostile stance. This in turn provokes the United States and Europe to confront Russia, which only increases the influence of Putin’s hawks by justifying their pessimistic and often paranoid outlook. Partly as a result, Russian foreign policy has grown more belligerent over time.
This aggression has yielded territorial victories, most famously the annexation of Crimea in 2014. But it has also left Putin significantly more isolated. Russian cooperation with the United States and Europe has, of course, stalled, but its work with India and Japan has similarly stagnated. Moscow has forged a growing partnership with China, but this relationship is likely to make Putin uneasy. Rather than bringing central and eastern Europe back under Moscow’s sway, the president’s gambit in Ukraine has breathed new life into NATO. If Putin’s ultimate goal is to transform the global order to fit Russia’s ambitions, he appears to have failed.
In more rigorously institutionalized states, there would be separate groups or agencies powerful enough to tell leaders when their aggression is backfiring. Yet like many personalized regimes, the Russian government lacks any real checks and balances- or even a way to thoroughly assess the data it gathers. As the Putin expert Brian Taylor has noted, Russia has no system to create “collective judgments” from its multiple intelligence services, as is done with the National Intelligence Estimates in the United States.
Personalism may give Putin extraordinary latitude within Russia. But if he does decide to invade Ukraine, this mode of governance will ultimately hold him back. Research shows that the information problems created by personalism can hamper a country’s performance on the battlefield and distort its leader’s perception of foreign threats. The security threats Putin sees in Ukraine, for instance, are shaped by his inner circle’s pervasive belief that the West lurks behind every Color Revolution. As a result, the president may discount the degree of genuine opposition to Moscow’s actions in former Soviet states. In fact, at the end of January, U.S. spy agencies said that Putin is underestimating the costs of invading Ukraine because his advisers are withholding information about the depth of local Ukrainian opposition to Russia and, relatedly, the strength of Ukraine’s resistance. They alleged that the president “is being misinformed by his own circle of advisers, who appear unwilling to confront him with the full consequences of military action.” Although it is hard to separate fact from speculation in intelligence reports, this problem is a common feature of personalist systems.
For Putin, the consequences of miscalculating in Ukraine could be grim. Although the president’s regime can shelter him from the repercussions of mistakes, if the Kremlin launches a major invasion and the war goes south, it will be hard for him to avoid feeling the impact. Putin will not only be more isolated and dependent on Beijing; he will also face a festering insurgency that will grow unpopular at home. He would not be the first Russian leader damaged by such a quagmire. During the 1980s, the Soviet Union occupied Afghanistan to try to keep Kabul firmly in its camp, and its eventual failure played a key role in undermining public trust in the system.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2022-02-04/bully-bubble
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Mar 1, 2022 16:29
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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Unless it involves Taiwan, Xinjiang, or their investments in Pakistan or Africa, Chinese foreign policy is basically 'we DGAF, just avoid pissing people off so we can continue to get richer and stronger in the long-term', so they'll tell Ukraine what they want to hear and Russia what they want to hear while doing nothing.
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Mar 1, 2022 16:42
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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quote:Plagued by poor morale as well as fuel and food shortages, some Russian troops in Ukraine have surrendered en masse or sabotaged their own vehicles to avoid fighting, a senior Pentagon official said on Tuesday.
Some entire Russian units have laid down their arms without a fight after confronting surprisingly stiff Ukrainian defense, the official said. A significant number of the Russian troops are young conscripts who are poorly trained and ill-prepared for the all-out assault. And in some cases, Russian troops have deliberately punched holes in their vehicles’ gas tanks, presumably to avoid combat, the official said.
The Pentagon official declined to say how the military made these assessments — presumably a mosaic of intelligence including statements from captured Russian soldiers and communications intercepts — or how widespread these setbacks may be across the sprawling battlefield.
But taken together, these factors may help explain why Russian forces, including an ominous 40-mile convoy of tanks and armored vehicles near Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, have come to a near crawl in the past day or two, U.S. officials said.
Seems eminently plausible that a decent chunk of the Russian army does not want to fight this war. I hope Ukraine is able to capitalize on this somehow, maybe letting Russian troops who surrender or defect know that nothing will happen to them.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/0...n-official-says
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Mar 1, 2022 21:02
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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https://twitter.com/MarkLGoldberg/status/1499066498261868547
141 in favor
5 against (North Korea, Russia, Belarus, Eritrea, Syria)
35 abstentions
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Mar 2, 2022 18:00
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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If I was Ukrainian and looked at the other Russian client states like Belarus or Chechnya i would not want to fall under their thumb at all.
That's a big part of why all started in the first place, Ukraine used to be more neutral between the West and Russia in the 90s, but younger generations saw how much better off Poland has become and aspired to join the EU as well. Of course this is incomprehensible to Putin who seems to genuinely believe that Ukrainians want to be part of Russia and the only reason Zelensky was in power was because he was propped up by the CIA and other rogue Western agents.
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Mar 3, 2022 10:58
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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Why would China try to peel off the Kazakhs and risk pissing off Russia when they can wait around and get the whole Russian bloc as a client, for free?
Edit: Tokayev literally does not have any other choices. And the Russians could easily intervene on the same scale again with a couple BTGs. It's not like all of their conventional forces are suddenly on the Ukranian border. DoD briefing indicated no movement of additional reserves or reinforcements in to theater.
This is a slight derail so sorry if that's a problem but from what I understand actively meddling in other countries like that is just not how China operates (for now). Remember the USA and Russia were superpowers who fought for global supremacy for a lot of the 20th century, so they're much more used to that kind of thing. China is more used to being a junior country focused on economic development and hasn't really focused on diplomacy all that much. There are stories about Russian diplomats coaching Chinese diplomats about the best tactics and rhetoric to throw their weight around more in the UN.
At its core Chinese foreign policy essentially consists of agreeing to build construction projects in other countries using Chinese labor and getting pissy at any country that recognizes or is friendly with Taiwan, and to do as little as possible about anything else so that everyone keeps ignoring them as they get stronger and stronger. They don't really think in terms of superpower Cold War logic of peeling off allies in other countries or intervening to install puppets in other countries and controlling their agendas like the US and Russia do. That may change one day, it probably will but it hasn't happened yet.
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Mar 3, 2022 23:01
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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Interesting note is that the US Intelligence assessment and this blog have repeatedly said before that "Russia has made some mistakes but has the time and resources to change course and correct."
Not seeing a whole lotta correcting, and if the reports coming out Russian military reforms and logistics being a grift pile of incompetence are remotely true, then maybe... just maybeeee they can't switch gears because no one knows how, and all the competent guys are gone.
Found a story from last year with interviews with Russian soldiers and officers about how poo poo the Russian army is. All anecdotal evidence is course but I'm very inclined to believe it after all we've seen in this war thus far.
quote:
TIMONOVO, Russia -- For Pavel Petrakov, a 23-year-old lieutenant in a military unit that monitors Russian aerospace defenses, the fact that the door to his officer-assigned dormitory room fell off its hinges was bad enough.
There were also the old bloodstains and feces on the wood floor. But the breaking point may have been the hordes of cockroaches in the communal kitchen.
“When I went to military school, I thought the army was cool, the officers were society’s elite,” said Petrakov, who was commissioned after graduating with honors from a prestigious St. Petersburg military academy.
“I never even imagined that you could drink like that and yell at children. They’re pigs at home, and they booze it up at work,” he told the North.Realities Desk of RFE/RL's Russian Service. “The most disgusting thing, because of which many flee from the army, is that they treat you like a beast.”
Petrakov is one of an unknown number of military officers who are resigning from duty, demoralized, or disgusted, or simply fed up by the conditions, physical and psychological, they are forced to serve in.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russia-military-officers-morale-problem/31612793.html
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Mar 4, 2022 00:40
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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From what I recall, Putin really did let Medvedev do his own thing for the most part (as people have said before Putin does not really care about domestic and economic policy, so that likely contributed to his hands-off approach) until the latter didn't veto the UN Security Council Resolution authorizing military action in Libya. Putin was livid, even more so after Gaddafi died, and after he took over again in 2012 he never trusted anyone to make important decisions ever again.
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Mar 13, 2022 11:17
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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Is there anything the West can do to get Lukashenko to switch sides or hinder the Russian invasion (e.g. dangling lifting of economic sanctions, recognizing him as president, promise we won't try to overthrow him in the future) or is he so completely dependent on Russia for his personal security that it's not possible? I know he was cozying up to the West a bit before 2020, which makes me think he's not ideologically wedded to become a Russian vassal, he's just a craven power-hungry opportunist who can be bought off for the right price.
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Mar 14, 2022 21:43
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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Yeah I get that of course. I was just wondering why, if thye're now buddies with China, are they also not picking China's stance which seems to be that the war is cool and good. But as Randarkman said, it could be that China just gives them enough leverage over russia to stick it to them, without suffering consequences.
Bit late to the Kazakhstan discussion but I read recently that China does not have really well-developed relations with Kazakhstan; it's primarily an economic relationship, while Kazakhstan - Russia security and political relations are much deeper. Which makes sense given how Kazakhstan was a part of the USSR for so long as well as the large Russian speaking population in the country.
quote:Beijing’s long-standing policy of non-interference, as well as the belief that a solid economic presence will automatically lead to a favorable image and increased voice in local politics, are some of the reasons China must contend with a limited political role. With China’s growth, the strategy might alter; however, influence operations cannot be supported immediately by diplomatic, intelligence, and expert resources.
Recently, many regional policy trends – from Lithuania’s growing ties with Taiwan to ongoing events in Kazakhstan – have been viewed in Beijing solely through the prism of its global confrontation with Washington. This drastically obscures the picture on the ground, leaving China’s framing devoid of key details. Consequently, the political dynamics can be heavily distorted, leading Beijing to commit errors and leave itself politically vulnerable.
Xi Jinping’s verbal message to Tokayev appeared only a day after the Russian-led troops had begun operating in Kazakhstan. Presumably, Beijing chose this form of communication in a bid to get the latest information on the changes at the top, ideally from Tokayev himself. But against the background of a tense situation, China’s Ambassador Zhang Xiao met only with Kazakh Acting Foreign Minister Mukhtar Tileuberdi, which, perhaps, at lower level than Beijing had anticipated.
Xi’s message was silent on the CSTO operation. Yet, it included criticism of color revolutions and strong words against any forces that wished to “undermine Sino-Kazakh friendship and interfere with cooperation between the two countries.” The latter is rather strange, since anti-Chinese motives, although undoubtedly present in Kazakhstani public opinion, were practically a non-factor during the January protests.
According to local experts, over the past two years, Chinese diplomats in Central Asia have mostly asked questions regarding the role of NGOs and American and Turkish leverage in political processes. In addition to this general political bias, China’s poor understanding of internal power shifts is visible with respect to Kazakhstan. This can partially be explained by limited access to first-hand information. Since the start of the pandemic, Chinese diplomats have locked themselves in a diplomatic compound, with a minimum of external contacts. Furthermore, the opportunity to communicate with pundits was affected by the arrest and trial of the leading Kazakhstan sinologist, Konstantin Syroezhkin, who was accused of passing secret information to China.
As my contacts in Kazakhstan indicate, PRC Embassy officials have often preferred to contact loyal figures who only mirror the Chinese narrative but provide no knowledge of the actual situation in their country. We can assume that cables were sent to Beijing concerning the effectiveness of Chinese soft power, and occasional anti-Chinese demonstrations were attributed solely to U.S. interference.
Hence, it was predictable that the Chinese response to Kazakhstan’s recent unrest was reactive, lagging behind the swift pace of events, and certainly less informed than the Russian one. The crisis has highlighted the fact that unlike Russia, with its strong and long-standing ties with the political, military, and business elite, China remains in a certain information vacuum in Kazakhstan, rendering Beijing unable to predict power processes in a state with which it shares a 1,782-kilometer border.
Meanwhile, political volatility remains, due to the uncertainty of the course of reforms that Tokayev will now undertake, as well as how bargaining with Nazarbayev’s circle will proceed. Russia may certainly possess sensitive information that gives it an advantage in Central Asia. Still, Moscow can hardly be expected to share this information with China, especially if it is obtained through high-level contacts.
https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/after-kazakhstan-crisis-china-will-reassess-its-influence-in-central-asia/
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Apr 1, 2022 19:19
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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Seeing the latest reports of atrocities out of Ukraine, and I'm at the point where I cannot deal with this level of cruelty and devastation.
I literally cannot process the emotions of looking at an army willing to commit crimes so utterly vile and evil against a vulnerable civilian population.
Who are these soldiers?
How can they do such foul things?
Been reading about the culture of dedovshchina, or hazing/bullying in the Russian army from Wikipedia:
quote:Dedovshchina is the informal practice of hazing and abuse of junior conscripts historically in the Soviet Armed Forces and today in the Russian armed forces, Internal Troops, and to a much lesser extent FSB, Border Guards, as well as the military forces of certain former Soviet Republics. It consists of brutalization by more senior conscripts, NCOs, and officers.
Dedovshchina encompasses a variety of subordinating and humiliating activities undertaken by the junior ranks, from doing the chores of the senior ranks, to violent and sometimes deadly physical and psychological abuse, not unlike an extremely vicious form of bullying or torture, including sexual torture and rape. When not leaving the army seriously injured, conscripts can suffer serious mental trauma for their lifetime. It is often cited by former military personnel as a major source of poor morale.
Many young men are killed or commit suicide every year because of dedovshchina.The New York Times reported that in 2006 at least 292 Russian soldiers were killed by dedovshchina (although the Russian military only admits that 16 soldiers were directly murdered by acts of dedovshchina and claims that the rest committed suicide). The Times states: "On Aug. 4, it was announced by the chief military prosecutor that there had been 3,500 reports of abuse already this year (2006), compared with 2,798 in 2005". The BBC meanwhile reports that in 2007, 341 soldiers committed suicide, a 15% reduction on the previous year.
In 2012, a draftee from Chelyabinsk region, Ruslan Aiderkhanov, was tortured to death by his seniors. The one witness who was willing to testify against the alleged perpetrators, Danil Chalkin, was later found shot dead in his military base. A contract soldier, Alikbek Musabekov, was later arrested in this incident.
In 2019, according to the Russian military prosecutor office situation with dedovshchina is getting worse. Incidents of hazing in the army during 2019 have increased. 51,000 human rights violations and 1,521 sexual assault cases.
And from the Guardian:
quote:The father of a Russian conscript who allegedly shot and killed eight fellow soldiers on an army base last month has blamed a culture of brutal bullying for driving his son to carry out the attack, raising fresh concerns over a poisonous culture of hazing that Russia claimed to have eliminated from its army.
Ramil Shamsutdinov opened fire from his service weapon last week on a military base in Russia’s Transbaikal region, killing two officers and six soldiers. Some media reports said he targeted the heads of his victims during the rampage.
Defence officials have looked for factors besides hazing that may have caused the incident, saying that Shamsutdinov may have suffered a nervous breakdown unrelated to his service. But his father told Russian journalists on Wednesday that he believed his son had been bullied mercilessly by his fellow soldiers.
“What could have driven him to this?” Shamsutdinov’s father told the Russian outlet RBC. “It’s immediately clear: hazing. Persistent bullying over a long period of time. That drove him to this state.”
The ritualised bullying of new recruits, which can include beatings and psychological torture by officers and older soldiers, has been a suspected cause for hundreds of suicides and thousands of desertions in the Russian army.
Several cases have caused major scandals. One soldier had to have his genitalia amputated in 2006 after being beaten and forced to squat for several hours on New Year’s Day by a likely intoxicated sergeant. Despite a decade-long reform of the army and shortening of the conscription period to one year, reports of brutal hazing and suspicious suicides have continued to plague army units.
Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, earlier this year claimed in an interview that hazing was no longer a systemic problem in the Russian army. He said: “There is simply no place for hazing in the army now”.
In Shamsutdinov’s case, defence officials have claimed there was no animosity among soldiers on the base in south-eastern Siberia. The head of the Union of Russian Officers, an NGO that regularly takes a pro-Kremlin stance, said the rampage may have been inspired by violent video games.
But regional reports suggest otherwise. The news outlet 72.ru from Shamsutdinov’s native region of Tyumen said that a lieutenant on the base was known to demand money from conscripts, force them to stay awake for days on end, and bullied young soldiers in other ways.
“Clearly he ended up in this type of group,” Shamsutdinov’s brother told RBC. “Maybe over several months he was bullied, persecuted, things were said to him. I myself served, I know how it can happen.”
Yup, this is the sort of military culture that is going to churn out a bunch of brutal rapists and thugs who set out to commit all sorts of war crimes. Rotten to the core.
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Apr 5, 2022 01:53
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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I'm bad at science, just how bad is picking up a source of cobalt-60 with your bare hands? Is that like immediately catastrophic or like 'you're gonna get cancer in 10 years' sort of thing.
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Apr 9, 2022 07:59
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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It also features a story about Macron meeting Putin that does not reflect too well on Macron
quote:A week later, on Feb. 18, Biden called the leaders of several NATO allies and told them the latest U.S. analysis. Biden told reporters in the Roosevelt Room at the White House later that day, “As of this moment, I’m convinced he’s made the decision” to invade. “We have reason to believe that.”
The French, however, continued to seek a way out of the crisis.
On Feb. 20, Macron called Putin and asked him to agree to a meeting in Geneva with Biden. The conversation led the French president to believe that Putin was finally willing to seek a settlement.
“It’s a proposal that merits to be taken into account,” Putin said, according to a recording of the conversation aired months later in a France TV documentary, “A President, Europe and War.”
Macron pressed the Russian leader. “But can we say, today, at the end of this conversation, that we agree in principle? I would like a clear answer from you on that score. I understand your resistance to setting a date. But are you ready to move forward and say, today, ‘I would like a [face-to-face] meeting with the Americans, then expanded to the Europeans’? Or not?”
Putin didn’t commit and appeared to have more-pressing matters at hand. “To be perfectly frank with you, I wanted to go [play] ice hockey, because right now I’m at the gym. But before starting my workout, let me assure you, I will first call my advisers.”
“Je vous remercie, Monsieur le President,” Putin concluded, thanking him in French.
Macron is heard laughing in delight as he hangs up. The French president and his advisers thought they had a breakthrough. Macron’s diplomatic adviser, Emmanuel Bonne, even danced.
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Aug 17, 2022 03:42
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May 10, 2024 16:28
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- JesusSinfulHands
- Oct 24, 2007
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Sartre and Russell are my heroes
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quote:In the afternoon an instructor treats us to a lecture on how great the Soviet Union was. How cheap the petrol was. How happy people were. I can’t stand any of this bullshit. We still have to clean up the mess that dictatorship left us. We still suffer from the rot that permeates our state structures. The army. People’s brains. It makes me angry when some of the cadets here sing Soviet army songs. As far as I’m concerned, the Soviet military songbook is full of contempt for the value of human life.
I’m surprised when I realise most of my fellow trainee troops actually think the same.
Gonna guess this is some old guy in the Ukrainian military who hasn't gotten with the times that Ukraine wants to be a part of Europe now, and that Ukraine is supposed to be fighting like a Western and not Soviet army.
edit: Yup later on, in the diary:
quote:Part of the problem is the training itself. And the contrast. More than half the instructors are good at what they do. They care. I’d pay to be taught by them in peacetime. But there are also the stale, good-for-nothing, Soviet-brained officers, with their ridiculous love of military pomp. Sure, none of them is going out of his way to justify Stalin. They all speak Ukrainian and they hate Russians. But they are still “Soviet” people deep down: closed-minded, insecure, anti-human. JesusSinfulHands fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Oct 11, 2022
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Oct 11, 2022 04:55
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Feb 21, 2022 20:30
