Posted on 01/22/2024 9:20:22 AM PST by marcusmaximus
Except NATO has never attacked Russia - and more importantly hadn’t talked daily about attacking Russia.
Russia had nothing to fear from NATO until 2022. And Russia KNEW it had nothing to fear from NATO, unless it carried on ratcheting up the butthurt, paranoia, blackmail and racketeering.
So what did Russia do? Blackmail Azarov into U turning from its electoral mandate to align with Europe, blackmail/bribe Yanukovych into giving Ukrainian economic independence to Putin, and start threatening to nuke Europe.
Eastern Europe put up with fifteen years of Russian fuel blackmail, cyber attacks, and incessant butthurt saber rattling before giving up on Russia ever coming in from the cold. France and Germany held back even during the first months of the SMO, and Macron tried to negotiate with Putin - what did he get in return for his “let’s not be beastly to Russia’? Endless mockery on Russian TV along with Duma boasts about how many nukes it’d take to wipe tha5 surrender monkey country off the map.
Face facts. Europe knows Russia has gone full tilt postal and is inventing fantasy excuses for doing it.
NATO expansion in the 90s had nothing to do with it, any more than the utter trickle of deaths between paramilitary groups in Ukraine from 2017 to 2022 with hardly any civilian collateral damage (according to the FSB and Russia’s own Human Rights Ombudsman, as well as the UN and Red Cross) had anything to do with it.
Russia talks daily about attacking countries while saying that they don’t want to do it. But they never needed to do it, or talk about doing it.
If the Russian Federation president doesn’t want war, why does his entire state propaganda apparatus invest so much effort on constantly talking war up and inventing ridiculous excuses for doing it ONLY for non Russian consumption, while telling the Russian people it’s actually about imposing a revived Muscovy ethnic and cultural dominance, de-europeanization of the Warsaw Pact region, and restoring the forever war between a Russian empire and western Europe?
Why do they arrest peace protesters? Why are they now talking about taking away the assets of anyone who doesn’t support this unnecessary war?
It’s not Europe or NATO saying “we’ve always been at war with Eurasia”. It’s Putin’s regime saying “we’ve always been at war with Europe”.
The USA is bankrolling EU NATO without the USA domestically seeing anything in it for its people. Fair enough.
If Russia invades Alaska after already unilaterally deciding its purchase by the US in the nineteenth century was unlawful, perhaps people like you can follow your own logic used in the Ukraine context and say fair enough, Russia should have Alaska “returned” and Russified without any fighting back. And if Russia floods Alaska with vatnik settlers, the settlers should have the whip hand not the American population that’s been there for generations.
Implausible, you might say. But then you were dismissing a Russian invasion of Ukraine as implausible the day before it happened. And you conveniently ignore how Russia displaced the settled population of the Donbas and bussed its own people in before claiming the wishes of the pro Russian minority trumped the majority.
Nobody’s talking about imposing regime change in Moscow. We don’t need to.
Entirely by its own actions Muscovy is alienating CIS and CSTO partners and decimating the population of able bodied men in the regions outside Muscovy. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine even annoyed China.
We can all pull up deckchairs and just wait. Eventually “the demands to do something about this outrageous man” will come from every part of Russia except St Petersburg and Moscow. We won’t have to lift a finger when the Russian Federation finally does what it should’ve done years ago and throww Putin, Medvedev, Dugin, Shiogu and the Zhirinovsky followers up on lamp posts.
Here is what a Russian wrote about current Russia on Quora.
“Why are Russians in Russia, aged 71, scared of Putin? If Putin, age 71, is getting old and senile, why are people afraid of Putin in Russia?
Many people in Russia SINCERELY support putin (including most of my family). Why?
1) Relentless propaganda on TV which conflates patriotism with support of our glorious leader. I.e. you cannot love Russia unless you are in love with putin and his policies. Alternative points of view are deemed destructive by defintion and are not broadcast anymore.
2) Breadcrumbs of earnings received by selling natural resources are distributed among population making lives of most people more or less ok (we don’t have a very high bar when it comes to living standards).
3) 71 is far from being senile nowadays and like it or not putin is still on top of his game.
4) putin successfully promotes Russia as the bastion of “traditional family values” skillfully exaggerating the insanity happening in the western countries. He argues against making heroes of people with sexual deviations, stressing that the real heroes are the people who do an ungrateful and hard job of raising children. Most people in Russia justifiably support this viewpoint and consequentially corruption, bad governance and other terrible things we are not even supposed to talk about are forgiven or forgotten.
5) Inability to change anything (serious challenge will be squashed) makes people either indifferent or often even supportive of putin - it’s a natural tendency to sincerely and sometimes fanatically support things we have to live with anyway. Makes life much much easier.”
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