mopsi

But it is a talking point. The cable simply shows an American diplomat who has swallowed the hook and reiterates how Russians want to be perceived as thinking. One of the main efforts of Russian diplomacy is to invite foreign dignitaries and representatives to Russia, surround them with "researchers" and "experts" working directly under Kremlin guidance, to create a false impression for guests of how "Russian experts" "really think". This creates so-called useful idiots who unknowingly become champions of Putin's regime, believing they possess some inside knowledge that others lack.

The narrative shared in the cable is hilariously detached from reality to anyone who is intimately familiar with modern Russia. Putin, who lets OMON beat and sexually assault peacefully assembling (not even protesting!) Russians within sight of his office windows, is supposedly worried about the treatment of Russians abroad.

It is the US government that threw reciprocity overboard, openly and publicly humiliating allies and partners throughout the past year, threatening to invade several NATO allies, publicly mocking soldiers from allied countries who had fought and died in US-led wars, and kicking Ukraine at its most vulnerable moment in an attempt to coerce it into surrender. Not to mention global economic warefare in the form of illegal trade barriers. The US government championed isolationism, and this is what the first taste of isolationism feels like.

For most of the world, the US-Iran war carries minimal upside (the reduction of Iran-sponsored terror groups in the Middle East) for considerable risk (terror attacks on their citizens). Previously, allies and partners were willing to grant access to their airbases and provide other forms of support and put their citizens at risk to maintain good relations with the US, because that meant something. With Trump in the White House, the US has become an unreliable and unpredictible banana republic, where government action is not grounded in sound policy or long-term international relationships, but depends entirely on the moods of El Presidente and serves his personal wallet.

He has made time and time again clear that he is not bound by any earlier agreements and commitments, so it should not come as a surprise when others respond with the same and propose starting negotiations from a clean slate.

No.

  > Was there something major that happened in 2013-2014 involving violence that interrupted the term of elected, legitimate president Yanukovich?

Yes; under extreme Russian pressure, Yanukovych blocked the passage of the highly anticipated Ukraine-EU trade treaty. This led to massive protests. He sent paid thugs (titushky) to harass and beat the protesters, but the protests only grew larger. When he panicked, about 100 protesters were shot in a single day. From that moment, he was politically a corpse and lost the support of even his own party. He ran away into hiding to escape arrest, and the Ukrainian parliament assembled and unanimously voted to hold snap elections, which took place a few months later.

This is the polar opposite of illegal seizure of power by a small group of people, or a coup.

There's nothing to prove; by definition, elections != coup.

There was no coup in Ukraine in 2014. It's one of those immediately revealing things like height of the chimneys in Auschwitz; just barely mention them and we all immediately know who you are.

  > only like 3% of that program was spent on actual AID, like food and medicine for the third world, but most of it went to funding media, news and journalists across LatAm, Asia, Africa dn EE

Source please. This doesn't pass the smell test, because the largest expenses in international aid programs are usually related to healthcare and agriculture. Propaganda is very cheap compared to producing and distributing malaria drugs or grain to the most remote corners of the world or building water sanitation plants in places that have no roads and no electricity.

  > The narratives about the benevolent West reaching out it's hand to help and framing every perspective which contradicts yours as "victimhood" (your post history) is also quite pathetic.

But that is exactly that - strange Russian victimhood. The entire USSR and the Eastern Bloc went through a societal collapse, yet Russians treat it as an exceptional event that affected only them and believe it was an intentional humiliation.

Enough time has passed that people who were in top leadership positions at the time have retired, and their memoirs and internal documents have been published. None of these sources show any such intentions, quite the opposite, people like Swedish PM Carl Bildt were scared stiff of potential humanitarian disasters and millions of potential refugees and they did everything they could to stabilize the socio-economic conditions in the former USSR. I vividly remember the photo of the first western cargo ship with a grain shipment in the port of Leningrad, and the celebratory tone that accompanied the photo in the newspaper. Now it's suddenly all forgotten.

Instead of getting credit for their hard work, they are blamed for the fact that Russians fucked up the USSR to the point that it was on the verge of starvation.

  > Free will? My own opinion? Gut feeling? Literature? Culture? Personal history and experiences?

Arguments like "coup in Kyiv" are demonstrably false. Only ignorance can defend them.

Since your post is dead already, I'll respond here:

  > speaking as someone who has an interest in history 

If you have interest in history, then why are you clinging to the meme-level Soviet boomer grudges? It's strange to see the USSR mismanage itself to the brink of starvation and then watch Russians blame foreign governments, who to the best of their abilities provided aid and expertise to help find a way out of that situation.

Sure, you can say that their advice was often misguided, but as much as Yeltsin was shocked to see what a regular western supermarket looked like, Europeans and Americans were shocked to see the poverty of the USSR and couldn't even fully grasp that kind of life. You can entertain our western friends by describing how plastic bags with foreign logos like Sony or Adidas were treated like luxury items in the USSR in the 1980s and carefully folded and stored after every use, or how it was children's chore to cut up newspapers for toilet paper because that's the best many could access; or how it was common even for the best and brightest engineers to put in a full day of work, and then go and work on small plots of land in the evening to grow food for their families. It was an unbelievable shithole.

The difficulties that followed the dissolution of the USSR were of your own making, in no way limited to Russia alone. To survive, the entire former USSR and the Eastern Bloc had to pivot overnight to producing something globally useful instead of milling screws at artificial prices for the now-extinct Soviet arms industry. Most swallowed their pride, did what needed to be done, and ultimately saw a meteoric rise in living standards.

Russians turned out to be pussies who balked at the first difficulties and allowed the KGB dinosaurs who had led the USSR into disaster to crawl back and take the lead again. And by the look of it, Russia is heading toward a rerun of the late 1980s and early 1990s, bogged down in pointless wars as its economy rapidly deteriorates.

The narratives you've thrown around are a cheap cope, assigning blame for Russia's failure to modernize to external actors. All of us who lived in the USSR and its aftermath and have an IQ above room temperature know that it is unfiltered bullshit. What interests me is why you cling to it. What would happen if you let go of the victimhood narratives and actually faced the fact that Russians fucked up the ample opportunities they had?

It's the same with the current war against Ukraine, which was lost in the first three weeks, and now is just a meatgrinder with no prospect of success. Why is it so difficult to admit that you fucked up, and let it go? The narratives about coups, Kyiv neo-nazis etc are all obvious cope, and quite pathetic as such. Nobody's forcing you to hold these views in Germany, so why do you hold them?

  > Speaking as a half Russian, half Ukrainian living in central europe, btw.

Speaking as a standard-issue vatnik, rather, hitting all the traditional made-up grieviances of the national victim narrative that is supposed to legitimize Putin and his buddies robbing the country blind. And as always, the most passionate patriots live abroad.

  > It's clear from this comment that you do not understand the complexities of US politics.

Overall, it doesn't seem like a very complex problem. The US simply does not have a vote of no confidence nor the tradition of using it when unfit people like Trump and his traveling circus reach the highest levels of government and need to be stopped. Instead, people pacify themselves with fairy tales about "checks and balances", which are nothing more than gentleman's agreements in a world with very few gentlemen, and no substitute for actual legal procedures for removing inept leaders. To pick an example from this week - where I live, Pam Bondi would have faced a vote of no confidence and loss of her position the very next day after her House hearing during which she made hysterical deflections and personally attacked members of parliament.

The "complex" part seems to be that Americans appear unable to even imagine holding public officials accountable like that. Instead of the American public's expectations of their leaders rising over time, they are rapidly declining before our eyes as governance inches closer to trash entertainment like reality TV and pro wrestling.

  > Other sources disagree

"Consumption" figures are also misleading. In monetary terms, Americans consume more health services than anyone else, yet have fallen behind in life expectancy: https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8... Key life milestones like getting a college degree, starting a family, buying a house, or retiring have all become much more difficult to achieve despite skyrocketing GDP figures. Less and less of the total wealth (which is growing) is reaching the average American family.

  > But it doesn't matter--you're arguing that prosperity for the average US worker began stagnating about 20 years after the formation of NATO. That's basically an anti-NATO argument, from the US perspective.

The prosperity of the average worker did not begin to stagnate when NATO was formed, but indeed decades later, when the US began to diverge from shared values to pursue financialization of the economy, deunionization and other forms of free-market radicalism that have set it apart from other advanced economies. NATO allies and US workers have been abandoned alike to pursue short-term gains, whether from outsourcing to China or cozying up to kleptocrats who promise to share their loot personally with the US president, his family, and his business buddies. Why should any American support this?

  > My goal is to abandon our place in the world and be like the Swiss. I don't want to destabilize yet another country (Russia in this case). We're gonna have to live with Russia whether we like it or not.

I don't think you understand what it means in practical terms. Switzerland is entirely surrounded by the EU, and its economic prosperity depends on access to the European Common Market. Switzerland must follow the policies adopted by the EU without having a voice in the process, because it is not a member of the union, yet the Common Market is vital and losing access is not an option. Switzerland has to abide by EU's state aid and competition rules, manufacturing standards, and countless other policies, but Switzerland cannot even restrict entry of people from the EU to live and work in the country. Again, why should any American want to lose control over their country to such extent? Are you really ready for an European-South American economic alliance that dictates how many Mexicans can enter the US or how much subsidies you can pay farmers? I seriously doubt that.

As for Russia, you have the luxury of shaping the kind of Russia you live with. Is it the Russia that enslaved half of Europe and is using their brains to build a massive stockpile of nuclear missiles to blackmail you while you dig shelters in your backyard out of fear for your life, or is it a different, more peaceful Russia that has abandoned imperialism like Germany was forced to? Isolationism is a fool's errand. You can very well pretend that the war in Ukraine doesn't affect you, but consider that the nuclear missiles Russians tried to set up on Cuba were built in Ukraine. Would you rather have Ukrainians living under Russian boot and building nuclear missiles to burn down American cities, or have them building rocket engines in support of NASA space explorations programs like they did in the same Soviet-era nuclear missile factories in the early 2000s? It's not a difficult choice.

Most countries in the world don't have a choice and have to deal with whatever the life throws at them. You do have choice. Use it wisely.

  > The US prosperity trend has been the same before and after WW2:

GDP alone doesn't tell the story, because it has become detached from real income metrics: https://aneconomicsense.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/going...

  > You yourself just explained how Russia saw us as a threat and destabilized our politics, which lead to the current situation. We would have been better off if NATO was never formed.

No, Russia fundamentally wants to see you fail and take your place in the world. Without NATO, that would've been simply easier. You can castrate yourself, but that will not change their goal.

No, the Euro-Atlantic alliance produced incredible prosperity in its heyday.

The current deteriorating state of the US is the result of departure from the previously held values and forms of cooperation. Nothing illustrates this better than the US president openly threatening the sovereignty of Canada and Denmark while accepting massive bribes from Arab sheikhs and calling genocidal dictators like Putin his "friends". This is the wet dream of people who want to see the US fail.

Why would any American want to hit the gas pedal and accelerate even further down this road?

Earlier you wrote:

  > I favor a policy of neutrality and world peace, not rivalry between major powers like the US and Russia.

The thing is, nobody's offering you that. In the ideal scenario for Russia, the US would be mired in internal conflict and instability to such an extent that it would be unable to function as a country, leaving Russia to dominate the world:

  > Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States and Canada to fuel instability and separatism against neoliberal globalist Western hegemony, such as, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists" to create severe backlash against the rotten political state of affairs in the current present-day system of the United States and Canada. Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements – extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#Con...

In other words, they want an endless line of Donald Trumps to ruin your country and turn it into a banana republic so that you wouldn't have the energy to pay attention to Russia stomping over the rest of the world.

Why would any American voluntarily choose this fate?

Nothing new: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_First_Committee#Issues

  > Imagine I came to you and said 'hey stickfigure not only with this war last for years, but in 4 years Russia will have the strategic initiative, control a massive chunk of Ukraine, and be continuing to push forward' -- what do you think you would have said? 'Russia must be failing' wouldn't really be a logical response then, or now.

"Four years" alone would've raised eyebrows.

If four years ago anyone had said that Russia would invade Ukraine with everything it got and that four years later it would still stuck fighting for the first eastern provinces, with casualties exceeding a million and no end in sight, they would've been dismissed as an insane doomer. And yet here we are.

By now, the war against Ukraine is among the worst disasters in the entire military history of Russia, far worse than the 1979 invasion Afghanistan and the 1904 Russo-Japanese war, which until recently were regarded as the worst catastrophies of the modern era. Notable Russian fascist Maxim Kalashnikov goes much further. He says that Russia tried to subjugate Ukrainians, but failed, and Ukrainians will return for revenge. He calls it a "cultural and civilizational defeat": https://x.com/wartranslated/status/1985270960321130516

  > Or soviet imperialism.

How can you call yourself a Marxist if you have apparently not bothered to read a single book on the history of the USSR? Shining examples of imperialism are unavoidable turning points in Soviet history. The invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia are the most well-known, but one must not forget OMON terrorizing Lithuanians, the infamous MVD troops cracking the skulls of Georgians with sapper shovels, and many many other examples.

Show one example of Soviet imperialism, you say? There are entire museums dedicated to the subject!

  Noam Chomsky, the man who has spent years analyzing propaganda, is himself a propagandist. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky in general, whatever one thinks of his theories of media manipulation and the mechanisms of state power, Chomsky's work with regard to Cambodia has been marred by omissions, dubious statistics, and, in some cases, outright misrepresentations. On top of this, Chomsky continues to deny that he was wrong about Cambodia. He responds to criticisms by misrepresenting his own positions, misrepresenting his critics' positions, and describing his detractors as morally lower than "neo-Nazis and neo-Stalinists."

From the intro of a lengthy examination of Chomsky on Cambodia: https://www.mekong.net/cambodia/chomsky.htm

Not only architecture. I recently saw a dirty Cybertruck and it looked like a cheap prop from a 1980s sci-fi movie. Made me think about how well the average Toyota is designed that it manages to look good even on a cloudy day while covered in a layer of dirt.

That shows the importance of listening to users. I too tried to learn Blender before the UI overhaul, but with prior 3ds max experience, Blender was infuriatingly counterintuitive; for example, it used the right mouse button instead of the left to select objects. Felt like those deliberately annoying demo pages that make you select phone numbers from drop-downs and click on moving buttons to submit forms.

Early this month, I was browsing the same sites I always do when Safari on my iPhone suddenly became very sluggish. I closed Safari and reopened it, and poof! Everything was gone: favorites, history, open tabs, everything.

This kind of BS has become very common with Apple. There's a very pretty happy path, and a very ugly muddy trail if you fall off the scenic route.

  > Of course the rhetoric changed as the situation changed.

Blaming NATO is just another such rhetoric, put forward because it is the most advantageous in the current situation. It activates fools who begin self-flagellation, and in the process, disrupt military aid to Ukraine, which helps the Russian war effort.

Even among Russians who can be considered serious experts, no one takes the "blame NATO" narrative seriously. It's an excuse. A pretext. Look up Hitler's speeches from early September 1939 and you will see similar rhetoric about Germany being surrounded by the Franco-British alliance, with Poland as its spearhead. The similarity is uncanny, because it follows a standard pattern of excuses used by aggressors: portraying themselves as threatened, framing their actions as defensive, and blaming external forces for the conflicts they themselves initiate.

  > If you look at old interviews of Putin

Yes, let's do that: https://x.com/adnashmyash/status/1977146505900573089

  2008: "Crimea is not disputed territory of Ukraine, and the issues of Russian speakers are internal issues of Ukraine."

  2013: "Russia certainly doesn't plan to send troops into Ukraine."

  2014: "After the annexation of Crimea, Russia doesn't plan to further divide Ukraine."

  2019: "It's nonsense that Russia plans to attack anyone in future."

  2022: "Russia's Special Military Operation does not involve the occupation of Ukrainian territories."

  2023: "The conflict in Ukraine is not a territorial conflict — we have plenty of own territories."

  2024: "Anyone who wants Russia to give up CONQUERED TERRITORIES in Ukraine must understand that this is impossible."

These were empty words of consolation after the allies decided not to invite Ukraine and Georgia into NATO.

Eventually, you will receive a million bucks from me. I am not giving you any timeline or conditions, but trust me, you are on an irreversible path toward that, I promise.

That's the beauty of it: the base refuses to even acknowledge that it is a tax, and that it is paid by Americans. The word "tariff" bypasses decades of anti-taxation programming with astonishing ease.

"Tariff" is indeed a beautiful word; one that led the most virulent anti-taxation crowd to passionately support new taxes. It's a fantastic example of how much the choice of words matters.

He was mentally disturbed, which kinda proves the point. After returning to Germany, he stabbed a woman for rejecting his advances. Later, he was convicted of shoplifting, and a few years after that he was convicted again of selling stolen goods.

Definitely a "character", even if medically sound enough to stand trial.

That tells more about your googling skills than about the availability of the material: https://xcancel.com/maxnesterak/status/2008961959731859757

  > After that, despite his campaign promises to fix relationship with Russia, he never personally met Putin officially. (The only time he met Putin, in an official capacity, was in 2019, with French President Macron and German Chancellor Merkel). 

Misleading. The so-called Normandy format (involving Ukraine, Russia, Germany, France) was the agreed-upon diplomatic framework for addressing the war and improving relations.

  > As Ukraine's President Poroshenko confirmed publicly, on the advise of the western leaders, he had decided to not implement the Minsk treaties they signed with Russia.

Not true. He never said this. It is a well-known distortion circulated by Russian propagandists.

  > It is clear that Zelensky too was convinced by NATO and EU officials to do the same as he began to look for a military solution to repressing and dominating the East Ukrainians.

Not true. Zelenskyy prioritized diplomacy, like the aforementioned Normandy format. After Russia renewed the invasion, he was widely criticized for not adequately preparing Ukraine for war and for postponing important purchases of weaponry.

  > In the end, EU and NATO got what they wanted - a proxy war with Russia, using Ukraine.

I don't think anyone can argue in good faith that the EU and NATO wanted a war with Russia. You really have to be on the other side of the planet, completely detached from the ground truth, to genuinely believe something like that. The war is a major strain on European economies, both due to the massive support that Ukraine requires and the massive costs of European rearmament to deter further Russian attacks on Europe. European politicians would very much prefer to sprinkle that money around in the form of social programs instead of spending that on bunkers and machine gun nests.