Russia seems determined to isolate itself from everybody except copycat socialist tyrannies like Belarus, Cuba and Venezuela.
What on earth do they think they’ll get out of it?
Why them? I thought the companies decided to exit, or their governments told them so.
Primitive thug Putin and his buddies want to stay in power and nothing else.
It doesn’t have to make sense outside of that.
What did Soviet Russia get out of not even having toilet paper and forcing people into two-hour bread lines?
Where Russia starts logic ends.
“What on earth do they think they’ll get out of it?”
I watched an analysis on what it is Putin wants. He’s a dictator propped up by oligarchs who owe their money and very lives to him. He essentially wants all of the surrounding countries to have leaders he picked who also owe their fortunes and very lives to him. Ukraine, a modestly less corrupt country, was beginning to do better. Ukraine was sidling up to Europe as a trading partner which is much more profitable than its traditional and only big trading partner, Russia. Ukraine was materially supporting Putin and, worse, it had discovered significant oil and gas deposits in the now disputed territories of the Donbas. Putin realized that the new oil and gas would compete against his monopoly, and he wanted it for himself or, at least, to keep it from competing with his monopoly.
For various reasons, the Russians stopped having kids. For one, in Putin’s Russia, they couldn’t afford them. Russia is in a Demographic collapse that is unrecoverable. If they were going to use their army to rectify any of this, they had to do it by 2025. But, not only has the invasion sparked a renewed interest in NATO, but it has also prompted an estimated one million draft age Russians to flee the country. Most of them won’t be back. This exceeds the estimated 40,000 kidnapped Ukrainian children who were shipped East to Siberia to help make up the collapsed demographic numbers. Also, anyone who was well educated has also fled. This has got to be one of the worst “oh crap!” moments any country has experienced.
Tit for tat; Russia is moving towards China. The Pacific Rim is where the real competition is at. Biden wanted to shut up Russia over his own graft in the Ukraine. Russia’s pivot towards China is going to hurt Western consumers in the long run. The entire world is in double digit inflation, but Russia is not suffering from self imposed energy restraints.
“Russia seems determined to isolate itself from everybody except copycat socialist tyrannies like Belarus, Cuba and Venezuela.”
Plus a bit more than half of the world, starting with India and China. Obviously, the media doesn’t report that.
Whenever the whiny arsed liberal scum parrot on and on about how “the rich” (used to be millionaires until Bernie Sanders got his million) were sequestering funds out of their countries and into others to avoid taxes, they called for seizing their domestic assets.
Odd that Russia is adopting the same liberal scum tactics. Odd.