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Ukraine is game to you?

DeacMan said:
Russia is not China. Their people don't exist in a complete information vacuum. You can bet they have some sense of what is happening.

This also isn't the Russian people's first rodeo with currency devaluation, although it will be the fastest and likely the most painful in a very long time. They know the drill. Cue the run on any good that people believe can hold value in Russia.
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Cool, it’s time for the Russian populace to rise up and kill their leaders, or they can starve. Their choice.
 
BillBrasky said:
Cool, it’s time for the Russian populace to rise up and kill their leaders, or they can starve. Their choice.
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True. This could force them into an “eat the rich” moment.
 
PhDeac said:
True. This could force them into an “eat the rich” moment.
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Isn't that part of plan? I'm sure the oligarchs have been prepping for these kind of sanctions on some level for months. I always thought part of taking the sanctions this far was the cause unrest in the streets, start riots, etc.
 
Frosty said:
Isn't that part of plan? I'm sure the oligarchs have been prepping for these kind of sanctions on some level for months. I always thought part of taking the sanctions this far was the cause unrest in the streets, start riots, etc.
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I'm not sure Putin and his government envisioned a scenario where their central bank would be sanctioned. I don't think that level of sanction has happened in a long time, if ever. I think he's missed the mark significantly on the international blow back as well as the level of resistance he's facing in the Ukraine. Question now is whether he doubles down or looks for an escape hatch (and whether the West will offer him one). For all the blowback he took back in 2012, Romney ultimately nailed it with Russia and Putin.
 
Yet his party didn’t heed his warning and got in bed with Russia as well.
 
BarcaDeac said:
This is like a bkf tribute post

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Sailor's favorite Democrat - the little red lubette - offered her take on this tweet.

 
DeacMan said:
LOL. Assuming people still smoke like chimney's there, maybe. About 35 years ago I spent some time in the Soviet Union (including in Ukraine). American cigarettes back then would fetch about 10-15x their worth in the US.
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Capitalism and much easier access to imported goods found them since. I went about 6 years ago and was shocked at how westernized it had become.
 
Intercontinental Ballalistic Tweets sounds like a good Twitter handle.
 
New York Times article on how Putin's invasion of Ukraine is putting his right-wing admirers around the globe in a tough spot. Per the article:

"Putin’s supporters are by no means limited to Europe.

In the United States, former President Donald Trump, whose term in office was marked with solicitousness to the Russian leader that confounded his Western allies, said Wednesday that Putin was “very savvy” and made a “genius” move of declaring regions of Ukraine as independent states as a predicate to move in the Russian military.

Those remarks left Trump an outlier in the Republican Party of which he is the de facto leader. But he was not totally isolated.

Trump’s media cheerleader, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, urged Americans to ask themselves what they had against Putin and echoed the Kremlin as he denigrated Ukraine as not a democracy but a puppet of the West and the United States that was “essentially managed by the State Department.” After the invasion, he, too, moderated, warning of “a world war” and saying “Vladimir Putin started this war, so whatever the context of the decision that he made, he did it.”

I don't know if the word "moderated" and Tucker Carlson belong in the same sentence, but at least Putin's fan boys in Europe and America are feeling some heat over this, and deservedly so.

Link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/putins-aggression-leaves-wing-fan-155759071.html
 
WakeForestRanger said:
They don’t, but it increases the chance Putin is taken out in a coup/revolution.
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HuskyDeac said:
It looks like they've decided they will give Ukraine all the resources they can to defend themselves while trying to cause Putin's removal internally.
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BillBrasky said:
Cool, it’s time for the Russian populace to rise up and kill their leaders, or they can starve. Their choice.
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PhDeac said:
True. This could force them into an “eat the rich” moment.
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The Russian people could be forced through economic destruction to install Democracy. Absolutely no way that a shamed oligarchic Petrostate could allow another vengeful strongman to take power. I wonder what a quick overview of recent history tells us.
 
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and there seems to be no more stubborn belief in American foreign policy than the notion that if we destroy an economy and depose a foreign leader, that the power vacuum will be filled by a globalist Democratic revolution. This extreme naivety survives on despite there being countless examples of America thoroughly breaking a country and then failing miserably to rebuild it.

Hell, the callous scenario Brasky mentions has already been lived through as Katastroika under Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, where the former nationalized economy was plundered by international interests which led to such famine,disease, and depression in Russia that male life expectancy fell by 6 years in the period after the fall of the Soviet Union.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41294-021-00169-w

“During the 1980s and 1990s the United States President George H. W. Bush pledged solidarity with Gorbachev, but never brought his administration into supporting Gorbachev's reform. In fact, "no bailout for Gorbachev" was a consistent policy line of the Bush Administration, further demonstrating the lack of true support from the West. President Bush had a financial policy to aid perestroika that was shaped by a minimalist approach, foreign-policy convictions that set Bush up against other U.S. internal affairs, and a frugal attitude, all influencing his unwillingness to aid Gorbachev. Other factors influenced the West's lack of aid as well like "the in-house Gorbi-skeptics" advocacy, the expert community's consensus about the undesirability of rushing U.S. aid to Gorbachev, and strong opposition to any bailout at many levels, including foreign-policy conservatives, the U.S. Congress, and the American public at large. The West seemed to miss an opportunity to gain significant influence over the Soviet regime. The Soviets aided in the expansion of Western capitalism to allow for an inflow of Western investments, but the perestroika managers failed…”


It is these conditions that directly led to Vladimir Putin
 
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Liquid Karma said:
Capitalism and much easier access to imported goods found them since. I went about 6 years ago and was shocked at how westernized it had become.
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No doubt. It would be hard for things not to have improved in economic terms for former Soviet Republics in the late 1980s - early 1990s. Just a clown show economy those people endured.
 
That very well could happen, MDMH. Nobody is saying it wouldn’t. You aren’t the only one here who knows history. We are just talking about possible scenarios. I haven’t seen anybody say any of these scenarios will have a long term benefit for the world at large.
 
PhDeac said:
You aren’t the only one here who knows history.
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You have repeated a version of this twice now - I have never claimed to be the only moral person or the only one who knows history. I believe this discussion deserves greater context and nuance than “Biden should sanction Russia into the stoneage” and “Russians will eat the rich”
 
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I never said that deposing Putin would lead to a thriving Russian democracy. If it does great, if not then whatever strongman that replaces Putin got a fresh lesson in the folly in trying to reassemble the tsarist Russian empire. Hopefully this sets Russia back another 30 years before they try to reestablish it by force again.
 
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