Putin stews over lack of sympathy for Russia’s downed jet

National Post ^ | December 1, 2015 | Kelly McParland

[ozzymandus]

Putin gets lots of sympathy on FR. He has a fan club here. The fact that our own president is a disgrace to the office doesn’t make a Russian dictator any better.

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

They are Ukrainians. Ukrainians. Repeat after me: Ukrainians. You may not like them or agree with them but they are fighting for the ideology they prefer.

[1rudeboy]

Except for the ones recruited in Russia. And their leader at the time, currently in Russia. He had a fan club here, too.

[lodi90]

Putin detonates another economic suicide bomb. Every time he attacks another country in this manner Russians are hurt by it. Increased prices, lost jobs, no vacation, etc. This has fail written all over it.

[lodi90]

They are Ukrainians. Ukrainians. Repeat after me: Ukrainians. You may not like them or agree with them but they are fighting for the ideology they prefer.

---

An ethnic Russian from Moscow is Ukrainian? Interesting Russian fairy tale you are spinning there, FRiend.

[lodi90]

They are Ukrainians. Ukrainians. Repeat after me: Ukrainians. You may not like them or agree with them but they are fighting for the ideology they prefer.

---

An ethnic Russian from Moscow is Ukrainian? Interesting Russian fairy tale you are spinning there, FRiend.

[ETL]

He has a plan (that would take into account an apology).

Putin has a plan alright. To grab control of the resource-rich Middle East. This in addition to their attempts at retaking their former Soviet states in Eastern Europe. KGB/FSB Putin deeply misses the good old days of the mass-murdering communist Soviet Union.

"Putin said Stalin deserves statues in his honor"

http://en.ria.ru/russia/20131219/185734707/Putin-Says-Stalin-No-Worse-Than-Cunning-Oliver-Cromwell.html
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"the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [20th] century" -Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the collapse of the Soviet Union...

"World democratic opinion has yet to realize the alarming implications of President Vladimir Putin's State of the Union speech on April 25, 2005, in which he said that the collapse of the Soviet Union represented the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.'..."

"The more I see and read about Mr. Putin, in power since 1999, and his 'managed democracy,' the more apprehensive I become about the future of Russia and the safety of its neighbors.

If Putin believes that the dissolution of the Soviet Union into 15 independent states represents the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,' then it follows that Putin might well believe he should do something to repair the loss..."

http://web.archive.org/web/20090415000000*/http://www.hooverdigest.org/053/beichman.html
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"The demise of the Soviet Union was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century'," Putin said in 2005.

http://www.thetrumpet.com/article/11102.30640.0.0/asia/moscow-puts-the-soviet-squeeze-on-neighbor-nations
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"'The Black Book of Communism,'; a scholarly accounting of communism's crimes, counts about 94 million murdered by the supposed champions of the common man (20 million for the Soviets alone), and some say that number is too low."

Forgetting the Evils of Communism: The amnesia bites a little deeper
By Jonah Goldberg, August 2008:
http://web.archive.org/web/20100711090651/http://article.nationalreview.com/365528/forgetting-the-evils-of-communism/jonah-goldberg
______________________________________

"The demise of the Soviet Union was the 'greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century'," Putin said in 2005.

[ETL]

From a 2007 article titled "Putin's Russia"...

"KGB influence 'soars under Putin,' " blared the headline of a BBC online article for December 13, 2006. The following day, a similar headline echoed a similarly alarming story at the website of Der Spiegel, one of Germany's largest news magazines: "Putin's Russia: Kremlin Riddled with Former KGB Agents."

In the opening sentences of Der Spiegel's article, readers are informed that: "Four out of five members of Russia's political and business elite have a KGB past, according to a new study by the prestigious [Russian] Academy of Sciences. The influence of ex-Soviet spies has ballooned under President Vladimir Putin."

The study, which looked at 1,061 top Kremlin, regional, and corporate jobs, found that "78 percent of the Russian elite" are what are known in Russia as "siloviki," which is to say, former members of the KGB or its domestic successor, the FSB. The author of the study, Olga Kryshtanovskaya, expressed shock at her own findings. "I was very shocked when I looked at the boards of major companies and realized there were lots of people who had completely unknown names, people who were not public but who were definitely, obvious siloviki," she told Reuters.

Other supposed experts - in Russia and the West - have also expressed surprise and alarm at the apparent resurrection of the dreaded Soviet secret police. After all, for the past decade and a half these same experts have been pointing to the alleged demise of the KGB as the primary evidence supporting their claim that communism is dead.

From the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the Russian security apparatus Cheka (and its later permutations: OGPU, NKVD, MGB, KGB) had been the "sword and shield" of the communist world revolution.

"We stand for organized terror," declared Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first chief of the Cheka for Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin. In 1918, Dzerzhinsky launched the campaign of arrests and executions known as the Red Terror. Krasnaya Gazeta, the Bolshevik newspaper, expressed the Chekist credo when it reported approvingly in 1918 of the terror campaign: "We will make our hearts cruel, hard and immovable, so that no mercy will enter them, and so that they will not quiver at the sight of a sea of enemy blood."

Unflinching cruelty and merciless, bloody terror have been the trademark of the communist secret police, from the Cheka to the KGB. Obviously, the demise of such an organization would be cause for much rejoicing. Hence, when the KGB was ordered dissolved and its chairman, General Vladimir Kryuchkov, was arrested in 1991 after attempting to overthrow "liberal reformer" Mikhail Gorbachev in the failed "August Coup," many people in the West were only too willing to pop the champagne corks and start celebrating our supposed victory over the Evil Empire.

But, as Mikhail Leontiyev, commentator for Russia's state-controlled Channel One television, recently noted, repeating a phrase popular among the siloviki: "Americans got so drunk at the USSR's funeral that they're still hung over." And stumbling around in their post-inebriation haze, many of these Americans have only recently begun noticing that they had prematurely written the KGB's epitaph, even as it was arising vampire-like from the coffin.

However, there is really no excuse for Olga Kryshtanovskaya or any of her American counterparts to be stunned by the current siloviki dominance in Putin's Russia. For nearly a decade, even before he became Russia's "president," THE NEW AMERICAN has been reporting on Putin's KGB pedigree and his steady implementation of a long-range Soviet deception strategy, including the public rehabilitation and refortifying of the KGB-FSB. ..."

(continues at link)

http://www.thenewamerican.com/world-news/europe/item/8420-putins-russia

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"For 16 years Putin was an officer in the KGB, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel before he retired to enter politics in his native Saint Petersburg in 1991.

He moved to Moscow in 1996 and joined President Boris Yeltsin's administration where he rose quickly, becoming Acting President on 31 December 1999 when Yeltsin unexpectedly resigned. Putin won the subsequent 2000 presidential election, despite widespread accusations of vote-rigging,[3] and was reelected in 2004."

"On 25 July 1998, Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin head of the FSB (one of the successor agencies to the KGB), the position Putin occupied until August 1999. He became a permanent member of the Security Council of the Russian Federation on 1 October 1998 and its Secretary on 29 March 1999."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin

[ETL]

OSCE says spots deadly Russian rocket system in Ukraine for first time
Reuters, via Yahoo News ^ | Oct 2, 2015 | Anton Zverev

MOSCOW (Reuters) - International monitors say they have spotted a new kind of Russian weapons system in rebel-held Ukraine this week, possible evidence of Moscow's continued interest in Ukraine even as it focuses on Syria.

The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, which is monitoring a ceasefire in eastern Ukraine, reported that its monitors had seen a mobile TOS-1 'Buratino' weapons system for the first time.

The Buratino is equipped with thermobaric warheads which spread a flammable liquid around a target and then ignite it. It can destroy several city blocks in one strike and cause indiscriminate damage.

Only Russia produces the system and it was not exported to Ukraine before the conflict broke out, according to IHS Jane's Group and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which track arms exports.

The OSCE's findings are embarrassing for the Kremlin, which has turned down its rhetoric on Ukraine and shifted attention to Syria, where it has begun air strikes. The report comes before President Vladimir Putin holds talks in Paris on Friday with the leaders of Germany, France and Ukraine on the peace process.

(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...

[Dalberg-Acton]

Do you really believe for one minute that Putin is “stewing” over this. Don’t be stupid like Kelly McParland.

[JimSEA]

I had sympathy for the families of those killed in the the victims of the bombing of the Russian airline’s plane. I have equal sympathy for those killed when Russian allied forces shot down Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

[SunTzuWu]

KAL007

[McGruff]

Kelly McParland is editor of, and a frequent blogger on Full Comment, and author of The Lives of Conn Smythe, a biography of the founder and builder of the Toronto Maple Leafs

A real foreign policy expert. The hoser.

[Thibodeaux]

It is not deplorable, it is war.

Russia committed and act of war in violating Turkish air space

You can rationalize the Russian air space violation tell hell freezes over but can never justify it

The Russian military was feeling it s oats and got cut down a notch

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

Well one of our own Air Force Generals who worked in Alaska said he would never have done that, and that slight airspace violations were common. Also Netanyahu said he would not have done it and that the Russian planes slip into that airspace, too, one in awhile. So it is not my rationalization but the level headed response. The U.S. has also been accused of violating airspace sometimes. If every time that happens the planes get shot down we will have a worldwide disaster on our hands.

[Thibodeaux]

The judgments to which you refer are not valid in the present situation

[The Ghost of FReepers Past]

They were said in response to this very situation.

[rickmichaels]

A distant cousin of an ex-girlfriend of mine was on that plane.

[Forward the Light Brigade]

Just wait til 200+ Turks die in a plane crash—see how many cry then? Kurds could sneak a bomb on the plane—or maybe an Iranian? Maybe a Russian jet could just shoot it out of the sky—Don’t they have stelth fighters?

[elhombrelibre]

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're sincere and not a mere putinista. They are Russians fighting for Putin. The facts are out there.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-number-of-russian-troops-killed-or-injured-fighting-in-ukraine-seems-to-have-been-accidentally-10472603.html