Russia and Ukraine

[Leonardo17]

What do you know, Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov, who constantly demands men go to die in Ukraine and threatens NATO, has his son just signing with a modeling agency in London, and not with the Russian army to go to Ukraine.

https://www.perild.com/2023/02/12/nails-...-solovyov/

---

Slavoj Žižek recently had an interesting opinion piece on what is going on in Russia.

The Russian state’s ideological madness and reversion to warlordism have been abetted by a religious fundamentalism that openly celebrates death in the name of achieving a god-like status. As Vladimir Putin’s propagandists are telling Russians, “Life is overrated.”

Rumors are flying about veiled jockeying within Russia over who will replace President Vladimir Putin, now that his war of aggression in Ukraine has gone so disastrously wrong. Such a struggle cannot fail to expose the morbid pathologies of Russian politics. The key players are not organized political parties but rather gangs of oligarchs who preside over various informal nodes of power.

This explains why Russia’s most effective military force on the front line in Ukraine, the mercenary Wagner Group, is not even a part of the Russian army. Russia is now a land of warlords, something one generally associates with rogue and failed states. Its current and aspiring leaders are trafficking in fever dreams of battlefield glory. Implicit in this martial culture is a Hobbesian view of life as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short – and increasingly cheap.

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commen...ek-2023-02

I listened to a podcast a few months ago. The guy related how he saw one of these Russian Oligarchs while on vacation in Greek in some Greek İsland in the Aegean. There were two separate oligarchs in two separate beaches there. They would order the most expensive champagne and offer it to everyone on the beach. They were reportedly competing with one another on how much champagne they would offer to everyone on the beach. And these guys were said to be only drinking coca-cola (being already high on something else so that they are not willing to even drink anything themselves).

 

That’s the only thing happening in Russia since the collapse of the USSR. So here is my point of view on the subject: