Russia and Ukraine

[Leonardo17]

Belaqua on Ukraine defeating Russia:

The Afghans (a few marauder tribes) managed to defeat the Soviet Union (The world’s – perhaps – N.1 military power at the time) after a 10 year war between 1979 and 1989.

Or: Turkey had never been able to completely end the Kurdish insurgency that began in 1980 and claimed the lives of many people on both sides of the conflict.

Still: I did expect the Russians to quickly take all of Ukraine and a Chechnya or Syria like situation afterward (with the whole region leaving the Russian Federation block as soon as the autocratic regime in Russia collapses).

But something weird happened and the Ukrainians are resisting (while paying a huge human cost in this war).

 

On Free Speech and US Propaganda:

The world is changing quickly as I said. What was very true in the 1990’s is very superficial knowledge today.

Example: Marine Lepen (The leader of the Populist RN Party that has been constantly increasing its votes during the last two decades) in France has been banned from politics. So guess who is reacting to that first: Hungrary’s Victor Orban and of course Vladimir Putin. Marine Lepen herself is making speeches that seem like logical statements but when you dig into it, it’s a bit like D. Trump’s speeches. Half of the things she is saying is false, exaggerated or distorted realities. Her statements are rarely about making her point (like an adult person). It has more to do with convincing people with very limited knowledge (ordinary people who perhaps don’t have enough time to study political issues in a detailed manner) through some simplistic statements that these people will somehow perceive as being true.

So this is our main issue today: Everyone is going to be affected by D. Trump’s new tariffs for instance. And although people seem to believe him, it’s now going to make Americans (or anyone else) richer.

(And there is never going to be a Riviera in Gaza either. Populist leaders are the ones who are deluded and are deluding their audience because of their ways of doing things that are based on despising the intellectual capacities of ordinary people like you and me J )

 

Later Comments:

Whether we are correctly reading the situation or not, almost all countries are now boosting their defense budgets. I don’t know if it is good to think of this as a good thing. If Russia’s economic and political transition to liberal capitalism had been monitored and supported more closely in the 1990’s there would probably be no Putin and we might even be living in a world in which Europe + the US + Russia + China were building the next ISS while Elon Musk was assisting them by bringing the old ISS back into the earth’s atmosphere.

 

Personally: I don’t like this era of protectionism and rising tensions between different powers. I’m thinking in terms of specie. All that money we spend on our armies etc. is actually money that we could use to avert climate collapse and create a truly circular economy. (And not cancel but increase things like US-AID because that’s the sort of thing that will bring lasting security to the word, not more and more sophisticated weapons)