Ukraine being within Russia's sphere of influence was the stability, albeit not palatable to a lot of Ukrainians. Understand I am not saying that "rule" under Russian is rosy, I am saying it was the status quo. The event of instability is the coup in 2014, and the subsequent conflict within Ukraine which then culminated into the Russian invasion are the consequences of the coup. however many people died during the coup, w/e any actors did, is as irrelevant as however many planes are being shot down or ships being sunk. what is relevant is what happens as a consequence.

Of course it's artificially propped up, but they're not paying a lot of their imports with rubles anyway, the currency is mostly worthless outside of Russia and not even the Chinese or Iranians want it. The good thing for Russia is that they're getting harder, more liquid currency for their energy exports. Didn't look it up, but I would guess that China pays for the Russian gas and oil in renminbi, which Russia immediately uses to pay for their imports of industrial and consumer goods from China. Perhaps they're also burning through their stockpile of gold and foreign currency which they had strategically amassed before the start of this war.

Russia will imho be financially good until the next bear market for global energy prices - but then, they will get fucked really hard and really quick. This source of revenue is the only thing that keeps them afloat, if they're still on wartime footing when that happens, they will run out of financial steam in no time. But until then, they're fine.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 5 2024 03:01pm

Those mobs were actually trying to overthrow a government by force, not a bunch of chuds having a lookie loo around the nation's capitol. And yet January 6thers got shot by trigger happy police too.
If anything, a government has a duty to quell an insurrection by appropriate force, and that can mean meeting fire with fire. The Maidan attackers were clearly far beyond what nonlethal crowd control measures could handle, the failure of state forces weren't in protecting a mob from itself by managing its bottlenecks. It doesn't matter if thats FSB agents or police or Yanukovych's own secret paramilitary, what mattered was that a mob of armed Nazis were trying to overthrow the government by force and needed to be stopped to preserve democracy. And instead the country fell and democracy ended. That was the event that destabilized the region. Not protesters fired upon, not Russia's response to seize Crimea, not the CIA filling the power vacuum afterwards to handpick the new government. It was a peaceful and reasonably stable democracy that was suddenly thrown into chaos by a coup d'etat by a radicalized group of revolutionaries. And any response to that, any of the events that follow, aren't equally culpable. It matters who cast the first stone. We can't know to what degree this color revolution had CIA backing versus a groundswell of western Ukrainian citizenry versus the Nazis leading the charge. Does it matter?

After Yanukovych refused, at the 11th hour, to sign the EU association agreement which the Ukrainian parliament had agreed upon, widespread protests erupted across Ukraine. They were initially peaceful, but got brutalized repeatedly by Yanukovych's notorious special police 'Berkut'. It was only in response to these assaults on citizens excercising their rights to free speech and free assembly that the protestors themselves became increasingly violent, started fighting fire with fire (in some cases quite literally). From there, the situation increasingly escalated until the day when Yanukovych and his forces completely lost control, fled Kyiv and the Euromaidan protestors took over. There is no doubt in my mind that all sides had agents and instigators among the crowd during the crucial days of the Euromaidan: Yanukovych-aligned secret service, Azovites, Russian operatives, CIA operatives. Probably also groups aligned with specific Ukrainian oligarchs. It was a complete clusterfuck of a situation.

In any case, it seems extremely dubious that you base your entire perspective on the Ukraine/Russia conflict on the notion that we know exactly what happened during those fateful days, on the notion that one side is unambiguously in the wrong... so wrong that it justifies the other side (Russia) waging a decade-long shadow war against the country, followed by a full-scale invasion and years-long shelling of civilian and residential infrastructure all across Ukraine. Even if all of your premises were correct, Russia's response to Ukraine's actions would still be highly disproportional.


----------------------------------------------------------------------


By the way, what "peaceful and reasonably stable democracy which was suddenly thrown into chaos" are you talking about? Remember 10 years earlier, in 2004, when the pro-Western side in Ukraine was once before on the verge of winning the presidential election and their leader, Viktor Yushchenko, was poisoned with dioxin in an assassination attempt by a Kremlin-aligned figure. The runoff from that 2004 presidential election had to be repeated on the orders of Ukraine's supreme court because of egregious voter fraud in Yanukovych's favor, with some regions seeing their turnout soar from 60ish percent in the first round to 98 percent in the runoff, while other Yanukovych strongholds reported turnout in excess of 100%. Yushchenko then comfortably won the re-run of the runoff.

Since the 90s, Ukraine had always been a corrupt shithole with a deeply divided populace, a country which had always been subject to a tug-of-war between Russia and the West. The narrative that Ukraine was a stable democracy before a bunch of sinister neonazis came along, overthrew the government and plunged the formerly stable country into chaos... is myopic at best, to put it mildly.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 5 2024 09:01pm

The swamp is draining itself which is beautiful to see

These people are all traitorous frauds, many of them think resigning will save them from the gallows

Canada pledges millions to 'gender-inclusive' effort to remove landmines from Ukraine

https://www.yahoo.com/news/canada-pledges-millions-gender-inclusive-140057518.html

Gender-inclusive opportunities! They/them can also get their fair chance to get blown up by a landmine!

Woke insanity or a 4D chess move to get rid of them?

DEI checklist item to get funding through I would guess.

I doubt it. It’s probably just a politically correct definition for mobilizing women and the mentally ill. Interesting how would they name Volkssturm... should be something related with pride.

This post was edited by Norlander on Mar 6 2024 02:09am