It is what Russia does.
What was Mitt Romney thinking?
The West's will to survive has been sapped by rejection of Christianity, the development of the social welfare state, leftism, feminisk, and multiculturalism.
The West has insurmountable debts. The West is dying and Putin aims to fill in the vacuum.
It’s a smarter strategy than thinking weakness will win over your enemies and everyone will end up sitting around the UN holding hands and singing Kumbaya.
Haven't the Russians been doing that since the 1940s?
Gee, what a surprise.
My general feeling for this: when Commies are quiet, that is when you need worry the most.
I guess Palin and Romney were not off the mark with their feelings on Russia. What say you Obola??
WOW..... This is HUGE!!!
Cut & Paste
People in the Baltic states cannot feel secure. Russian President Vladimir Putin has a plan he has been working on for over a decade. So says former adviser to President Putin, Andrey Illarionov.
Giving a presentation at a conference in Palanga, Lithuania, Illarionov, who advised Putin on economic policy in 2000-2005, referred to a question that was raised in the recent Riga Conference 2014: Can people in Riga sleep peacefully at night?
“The same question could be raised in Tallinn, Vilnius, Palanga, Bucharest and other cities. No one in Riga could reply to it in the positive,” Illarionov said. “From my side, though, the question should be rephrased, especially after Barack Obama visited Estonia and said that NATO was prepared to defend Tallinn, Riga and Vilnius. The situation seems safer after the statement, but we must look at military readiness, military equipment at hand, not words. From the point of view of military readiness, NATO forces in the Baltics are insufficient.”
Illarionov says that the West already failed the test in Kiev, Donbass and Crimea. Ass long as an aggressor is not subjected to the full force of economic and military sanctions, no one can sleep peacefully.
“We are talking about a crisis in Ukraine. But such a definition is already a victory of Putin’s propaganda. An achievement of the Kremlin’s information war. It’s not a crisis, it’s a war. And, at the very least, a Russian-Ukrainian war,” says Putin’s former adviser.
Preparations running back a decade
According to Illarionov, Russia has been preparing for a major war at least since 2003 and for a confrontation with Ukraine and capture of Crimea, since 2004, when the ‘Orange Revolution’ started in Kiev.
Another contingency plan was drafted for 2010, in case Yulia Tymoshenko had won presidential election and not Moscow-backed Viktor Yanukovych. One more potential date for a war was chosen in 2015, according to Illarionov, when Ukraine would hold a presidential election. However, the Maidan happened sooner.
According to Illarionov, Putin himself mentioned plans in Ukraine that same year in a NATO summit in Bucharest - he said that Ukraine was not a real nation, but a state that took over lands that historically belonged to Russia as well as Hungary, Poland and Romania.
The current Ukrainian-Russian war, Illarionov says, began on 27 July this year, when Putin started talking about the “Russian world” during a ceremony to mark an anniversary of the baptism of Slavic peoples.
Legalized aggression
According to the former presidential adviser, Russian laws essentially define four categories of ‘Russians’: ethnic Russians, irrespective of whether they reside in or outside Russia; Russian-speakers, irrespective of their nationality; all former citizens of the Soviet Union and their offspring living in the territories formerly covered by the USSR; and former citizens of the Russian Empire (pre-1917) and their offspring living in the territories once covered by the Russian Empire.
“Such a legal base allows the Russian army to protect all the Russians listed in the law. Therefore, for the Russian side, such actions of the Russian army beyond Russian borders might seem completely legitimate,” Illarionov says.
He adds that Putin thinks of the current confrontation not as world war three - since that was the Cold War - but as world war four.
“Some scholars say this is Russia’s war against the West: allegedly, the West have made many mistakes, are moving in a wrong direction and Russia is trying to defend its values,” according to Illarionov.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin has a plan he has been working on for over a decade.”
All he needs to put his plans to work is for America to
elect an ignorant, sissified, anti capitalist, unqualified
weakling POS for president. Guess what.
The problem of course is Obama himself, sense he took office with a policy agenda the very opposite of Regions he has begun to reverse every gain made in the last 30 years. Our enemies in the middle east are now far stronger, and even our old enemies in the 2nd world are rebuilding.
Maybe if we had an honest press core someone might point out that doing the opposite as Reagan is having a very much opposite effect as Reagan.. Who would have thunk it...