Russia and Ukraine

[Leonardo17]

Russia today has nothing to do with the Russia of the 90’s for instance. People are fleeing the country in masses. The ones who did not flee are very poor and they live in their fantasy world created by the propaganda machine.
 
Iran is an oil-rich country who can’t feed its own population. They produce Shaheed Drones + Nuclear weapons. And that’s about it.
 
North Korea is selling its own population to China to work in slavery-like conditions in the production of textile products of some famous European trademarks.
 
Countries like Egypt / Morocco / Jordan are not very powerful countries and are not democratically governed, but these are still sovereign states that need to be respected. Still, places like Venezuela / Haiti / Cuba / Syria or even Iraq are not what I would call “real countries”. I see these places as some sort of void areas that are created by the limited global geopolitical understanding of our times. George W Bush called them “Rogue countries”. I call them “empty spaces”

Putin's "Russia" is different than Soviet "Russia".
Soviet Russia had different tactics than Putin's Russia.

Soviet Russia was an imperialist superpower, while Putin's Russia is a member of a bigger alliance that includes "China-North Korea-Iran,...(other countries we don't yet know).

Soviet Russia fought for the USSR only, but Putin's Russia fights for the bigger alliance I just mentioned.

On Afghanistan: No one kicked anyone out. The US left (I don't know why they left) and the corrupt "Afghan Government" fled to India without forgetin his dollars + Classical sports car. than barbarian hordes claimed the country as their own and thats about the end of the story

No, the U.S "retreated" just like Vietnam and lost Billions, we mentioned that in an old post.
Back to Putin's Russia.

I don’t agree with that. I was born in 1981. I visited Bulgaria in the time of the socialist dictator Todor Jivkov (1919-1998). I saw people with Turkish origin queuing in front of our embassy to get a visa to Turkey. I saw the very same people moving back to Bulgaria after the end of communism when Bulgaria became a part of the EU in 2007.
 
What your generation doesn’t know is the issue of true communism. So yes, Stalin was a dictator and a mass murderer. But there is an element that makes him different from Putin (or even Mussolini). Stalin was a believer in what we call “Proletariat dictatorship”. So live was not very easy in Bulgaria in the end of the 80’s. But people had more money than they could afford. In east Germany for instance people were queuing for something. When you asked them what they were waiting for, they would tell you that “if all these people are waiting there has to be something at the end of the queue”.
 
Here’s a picture of the first McDonald’s restaurant that opened in Moscow in 1991:


 
+ in socialist countries you had free electricity, healthcare, education, working hours were something like 30 hours a week. Of course it was totally hypocritical in the bottom. But we in West (people from the left-wing of the political spectrum) we still believed in the Soviet Utopia etc.
 
The reason why Gorbatchev ended it all was that he saw that hypocrisy and decided it was time to end it once and for all (see: Final scene of Rocky IV: with Rocky Balboa saying “We can all change”).
 
On Afghanistan: In North-Western Syria female Kurdish fighters I able to push these sons of ….s back. I could push them back with some other people + some basic weapons. They are barbarians who can only terrorize unarmed local populations. The US decided (and I don’t agree with that decision) to pull back because the entire effort was very demanding in terms of finances. It was nothing like Vietnam where they were facing a real army that was backed by a very patriotic population. It wasn’t even like the Soviet pullout out of Afghanistan which was also a mainly patriotic type of war at the time.
 
And I don’t know more on that. There are probably other people in this forum with better explanations
On the void Status of Countries like North Korea:

Kim Jong Un banned suicide and called it an "act of treason against socialism,"