Putin is Ruining Russia

[Doll]

Approval of the job Putin is doing is over 80% in Russia. Putin's job for the last 5 months has been killing Ukrainians. There is a connection there Doll.

Then give me the link to this 80% otherwise all your words are just "shaking the air".
Show me.
Or is it just rating of the President?

[Doll]

Doll,
Putin started the current conflict in Eastern Ukraine. How he started it is fairly common knowledge to all except Russians that approve of his actions. Why he started it is still somewhat a mystery. Putin can end it but to date he hasn't and Ukrainians continue to die along with innocents of other countries.

He did not start anything- the crysis was started by Ukrainians themselves in 2013 (actually long before)

[tfcrew]

Could multi-billionaire George Soros be the culprit?
Alex Jones mentioned and I Googled this...

Obama allows George Soros to spend billions to destabilize Ukraine: Fetzer

[Audio]..

He [Soros] should be arrested.

Right I own 50 lawyers too-
They both should.


Other links-

http://www.google.com/#q=george+soros+ukraine

[AC]

In practical terms, in my opinion, Washington is about to declare war on Russia. Not militarily, but economically. It's a small window of opportunity for the crazies in Washington and it's got to do With the New kid on the Block, BRICS.

Putin is not ruining Russia. He tries to save it. If he fails, Russia will go back to being just another country under the command of the Empire. Then Washington goes for the Next big threat to it's hegenomy... China (provided China by then didn't voluntarily drop it's pants and bend over for Washington).

Hitler also told a narrative of Germany being persecuted by the other Western powers.  And like Putin, he controlled all of the media so that the Germans at that time believed him.

[Photo Guy]

US- who?

The 'World'

[Photo Guy]

Doll, how was the crisis started?

[Muj]

I just want to remind what "Newrussia' MEANT centuries ago.

Yes Doll it was Kievan Rus centuries ago.  Moscow was founded as a vassal of Kiev.

[Faux Pas]

Then give me the link to this 80% otherwise all your words are just "shaking the air".
Show me.
Or is it just rating of the President?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2014/03/26/putins-approval-rating-hits-80-percent/

[Doll]

The 'World'

Who is it ?
Africa doesn't care)))))))))
 

[Doll]

Doll, how was the crisis started?

Google

[Boethius]

All this cr-p started in Ukraine LONG before Crimea. So is Putin to blame for it too?
I am talking about 1 year ago, 2, 3 and more.
You are talking of somebody "ready to die" for something. Pleeeaseeeee!
Ukrainians THEMSELVES created this "war" situation.
By NO means I suppport any war at all.
But the topic starter opened this thread with this title which makes no sense.

I'll agree with you on this point, but I don't think it is in the way you believe.


Most of this conflict, in terms of Western Ukraine, has its genesis in the period from 1945 to 1989.  Western Ukrainians were ruled not from Kyiv, but from Moscow.  The oppression in that region was off the charts.   Their desire for their own language and culture was defined as "bourgeois nationalism", to be eradicated, and bourgeois nationalists dismissed from their jobs or imprisoned.  Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of Svoboda, was a Komsomol leader, with an expertise in nationalism (which of course, as a loyal commie, he espoused should be eradicated).


So, naturally, when the USSR collapsed, the speakers of this language would demand it be spoken.  I'd argue that the unnatural oppression of Ukrainian language during Soviet times is partly responsible for the extreme nationalism one can find in regions today.


In the Donbass, no one was forcing Ukrainian on the locals.  Even the language law which precipitated riots there would have protected Russian language rights, as they are enshrined in Ukraine's constitution.


I have posted links to surveys, taken from January to March 2014, which prove that the majority of those in the Donbass, some 80%, wanted to remain a part of Ukraine.  That was even after the infamous language law, which the then acting president repealed. 

I have posted a link, written by a Russian journalist for a Western source, in which Strelkov, who is not from the Donbass, has advanced the Russian state's interests elsewhere, and who currently lives in Moscow, has stated that in the region, less than 1,000 locals were willing to fight for the Donbass' independence.  I have posted links demonstrating that the leaders of the current conflict are all Russian citizens with FSB/GRU connections.  They are not locals.  So, yes, I believe one can trace this to Russia.

[2tallbill]

Why is it BS? Can you be specific? Whether you like it or not, my view is shared by the majority of people around the world. Open your eyes... Putin's invasion of Ukraine and constant lying will create an atmosphere that is bad for investment. If it was good for the Russian economy to invade Poland or Estonia, would that be okay with you? There is blood on Putin's hands as he supplies powerful weapons to a bunch of drunk separatists in Ukraine. Russians should feel bad about that, because Putin is trying to force Ukrainians to accept HIS idea of 'New Russia'. Before this war, the people of Ukraine thought of Russians as their brothers, their cousins, but now.....

Until this post you haven't connected any dots at all. You kept
saying that Putin couldn't be trusted hence he is ruining Russia.

So now you are saying that he will ruin Russia by not having
sufficient foreign investment? and that he is stifling foreign
investment because of his false claims regarding Ukraine?

Obama lies daily. Does that reduce foreign investment in the USA?

I think that your logic is shaky at best and you are still jumping
to a conclusion. You should flesh out your argument a bit, starting
at what Putin did, or didn't do then move on point by point.

I am no apologist for Putin but he has grown the Russian economy
quite substantially since he started. The standard of living has significantly
improved.

Frankly I think that the corruption in Russia is what stifles foreign 
investment. There is no equal protection under the law, you might
start a business in Russia and then have it taken from you or the
payola required might be too high to stay in business. If Putin wanted
more foreign investment then he should address that first.

Udachi!

Bill

[Muzh]

Then give me the link to this 80% otherwise all your words are just "shaking the air".
Show me.
Or is it just rating of the President?

Here

[Boethius]

I just want to remind what "Newrussia' MEANT centuries ago.

I'm not following your train of thought with this.  Putin uses it as a means of buttressing his view that these lands are inhabited by ethnic Russians, and, therefore, should be part of Russia.  But that is not accurate.  Those identifying themselves as ethnically Ukrainian are majority populations of all regions of Ukraine (Crimea excluded). 


These regions were more mixed in Tsarist times, with Germans occupying large swaths of lands.  However, Ukrainians were the predominant ethnic group in "Novorossiya".  Almost all the cities of Tsarist Ukraine were predominantly Russian, with large populations of Jews, Poles, and other ethnic minorities.  The countryside tended to be predominantly Ukrainian speaking.

[Doll]

I'll agree with you on this point, but I don't think it is in the way you believe.


 
 

 

You may THINK what you want, dear

[Muj]

All this cr-p started in Ukraine LONG before Crimea. So is Putin to blame for it too?
I am talking about 1 year ago, 2, 3 and more.
You are talking of somebody "ready to die" for something. Pleeeaseeeee!
Ukrainians THEMSELVES created this "war" situation.
By NO means I suppport any war at all.
But the topic starter opened this thread with this title which makes no sense.

Doll, the demonstrators in Kiev did not want separatism and did not use war to force their will.  Yanukovych employed deadly snipers to try to enforce his will in Kiev.  The East UA separatists must use war to enforce their will as the majority in East UA does not want their control.  Sure UA has regional conflicts as any country.  However, when a country as Russia shows up with mercenaries, weapons and surface to air missiles then the conflict becomes worse and more deadly.

[Boethius]

You may THINK what you want, dear

As can you.  The evidence of Russian involvement in making this conflict much more prolonged, and violent, is clear. The narrative of this being the protection of "Russians" is false. 

[Doll]

As can you.  The evidence of Russian involvement in making this conflict much more prolonged, and violent, is clear. The narrative of this being the protection of "Russians" is false. 

show it

[krimster2]

A Memory

I remember an early afternoon on May 8, 2005, it was slightly cloudy, I was standing on the curb of Sevastopol’s main street, “Bolshaya Moskaya” watching the Victory Day parade.

The sights were overwhelming for me, a company of Russian soldiers marching briskly by, followed by a much slower, more deliberate group of gaunt elderly men wearing what were undoubtedly their original uniforms of  “The Great Patriotic War”.  I saluted them, my 4 year old daughter walked into the parade with her long blonde hair trailing in the wind,  and handed one limping veteran a rose and said, "spossiba”, he leaned down and gave her a kiss, I think there were tears in my eyes.

However,  there was something nagging at my brain, some feeling that I couldn’t quite shake, then when there was a short lull in the parade, it hit me, it was the flags, the flags!  Even though we were in Ukraine, I didn’t see one Ukrainian flag! Why should I find that strange, because flags were everywhere in the parade, hundreds of them, even some of the bigger flags had similar little flags tied to their retaining ropes, but almost all the flags were Russian mixed in with a few Soviet ones, but I didn’t see even one Ukrainian flag!

Shakespeare’s prophetic line from Macbeth was being uttered somewhere deep in my brain, “By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes”.  What I didn’t realize at the time, was that this Victory Day parade was a Russian creation.  The only difference between the Vicory Day parade in 2005 and the last one in 2014 (after the Russian annexation of Crimea), was that the one in 2014 had more Russian artillery in the parade (which was probably recently introduced).

Oddly enough, the only Ukrainain contribution to the Victory Day in Sevastopol was Nemiroff, which had a large yellow and green tent handing out free samples of Vodka.  You go patriots!

The Big Picture (Stuff you should already know)

In 1989 the Soviet 40th Red Army retreated from Afghanistan after a costly war,  and a few months later the Berlin Wall fell, and shortly after that there was a failed coup against Gorbachev (who I met later at a fund raising dinner in 1992),  within two years the Soviet Union would callapse completely and split into 13 different republics.  This was followed by a sharp economic decline and massive drop in the standard of living in these newly independent republics.

The Soviet Union’s main geopolitical enemy (The United States), was very happy about these events, they gave credit for the Soviet collapse to a HollyWood film star who made a film called “Bedtime for Bonzo” whose theme was teaching 1950‘s American cultural morality to chimpanzees, and who later became governor of California and then President of the USA, and whose politcal agenda seemed earily similar to the “BedTime for Bonzo” movie.  The USA soon thereafter declared a “peace dividend” and Bonzo it was revealed suffered from a disease whose main characteristic is “loss of the ability to think and reason clearly that is severe enough to affect a person's daily functioning”, and rode into the sunset...

So then what happened in the glorious worker’s paradise?  It became a lot less glorious.  It all goes back to Peter the Great
(1672-1725) Emperor of All Russia, that is, “Russia”, “Little Russia”, “White Russia”, as well as the little known and more geographically obscure, “Drunk on their Zhoppa Russia”.  Peter, was the great Russian “reformer”, who wanted to take Russia from a medieval, backwards nation, and transform it into a modern European nation.  In other words, if Peter the Great was alive in 2013 and living in Kiev, he would have been the first person mowed down by Berkut snipers, how ironic!  It was Peter who was the original architect of Russia’s civil service, who noticed that there was a funding issue for civil service salaries, and who decided that if someone were clever enough to receive the civil service appointment, that they’ d be clever enough to figure a way to extract a salary from the appointment all on their own.  From then on, Russian civil servants became very clever indeed!   So what did these poorly paid civil servants do after the Soviet Union callapsed?  They emabarked on a program called “privitization” which not surprisingly was very “clever”.  So here’s how it worked, let’s say you were the minister of economic development, you could decide to privitize the largest coal mine in Russia, and hold a secret auction that only you knew about, not surprisingly you received the highest bid and were awarded the coal mine, valued at 300 million USD for a bid of 10 million USD, there is one problem of course, your salary of 2000 USD per month, doesn’t give you enough liquidity to pay the bid, so you allow yourself to write an IOU for 10 million USD payable by future profits of your new coal mine, but you’re not done yet.  You go to your “dear friend” in another department of the ministry of economic development, and you get a permit to export coal to Europe or China, in exchange for giving him 20% of the sale price.  All sale funds are transferred to a Swiss bank account which grows fatter every year.  Unfortunately, with all the income going into your shared Swiss bank accounts, you don’t seem to have anything left over to, well, you know, to pay the people who actually produce all this wealth just for you, so every once in awhile you transfer some money back to Russia to pay your worker’s salaries.  If workers get angry and leave before you pay them, you say, “sorry you quit, before I could pay you, so now I owe you nothing”, so workers don’t quit.  It’s all very clever.  The end result was that coal that was once used to fuel the central heating systems in Russia’s major cities now has to come from somewhere else, and Russia’s largest coal mine, which was once owned by “The People of Russia”, is now owned by some guy named Yuri something or another.  Whenever you see a new mansion in Russia, or an expensive sports car rambling down the street, think of Yuri.  The Yuri phenomenon was once investigated in detail by a fellow named Paul Klebnikov.  I’m sure he won’t object if I call him Paul, he won’t object, well because he’s dead, and so not in a position to do so.  Paul became the editor of the Russian edition of Forbes’ Magazine Russian edition.  Paul’s very last article for  Forbes’ Magazine Russian edition, was called “Russia's 100 wealthiest individuals” or the Forbes’ 100 for Russia.  It basically said that the 100 richest people in Russia were a bunch of Yuri’s who didn’t create any of the wealth they enjoyed, but stole it from the Russian people.  OK?  Paul was shot 4 times, but survived, but later died, when like an episode of “The Keystone Cops”, the ambulance transporting him to the hospital forgot their oxygen bottle and the elevator carrying him to surgery broke down.  Interestingly enough when Anna Politkovskaya a jornalist who was highly critical of Putin was shot to death a year later on Putin’s birthday, she was also shot 4 times, a coincidence I’m sure...

Which Leads Us To Now
Putin, our dear former KGB Col. wishes to undo, “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and run the movie in reverse.  After annexing Crimea (a story that has yet to be told, I can assure you), he uses the usual tried and true Soviet methods, propaganda, and creating a proxie army in Eastern Ukraine, “The Separatists”, of whom, at least 40% are actual Russian citizens and whose commander Igor “Strelkov"-Girkin a former commander of the Russian special forces during the Chechen war in 2001 who says he only quit working with the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) in May 2013.  Strelkov’s recent video posted online said he “could never have imagined” that of the more than 4.6 million people living in the Donetsk region, only about 1,000 volunteers were willing to join his rebel army to defend Novorossiya: “We can see anything but crowds of volunteers outside our gate”, so this is why recruitment centers are now springing up all over Russia. 

After annexing Crimea, a simple examination of a map will show you that Putin needs to also take Southern Ukraine to protect supply lines and also protect the rights of the 6 nuclear reactors in Zaporizhia to have Russian Technicians instead of Ukrainian ones. 

To be continued (a dire warning)

 

[Muzh]

show it

If you can't open your eyes, you can't see.

[Boethius]

Doll, I've provided links in several threads on the forum.  Furthermore, Putin has admitted, since the outset, that he has "influence" with the terrorists.  He has so stated to European leaders.   This is not coming from Ukrainian, or American sources.

[Muj]

Well said Krimster2.  Interestingly, Putin originally promised to eliminate corruption in Russia and failed.  So the latest grab for popularity.

[Doll]

If you can't open your eyes, you can't see.

BS

[Gator]

Krimster,

Superb account of the Big Picture with one omission, a large omission. 

In Putin's rise to power and throughout his continuing authoritarian hold of the reins, he has been supported by a gang of the richest "Yuri Somethings."  So if he wants to run the film "Collapse of the Soviet Union" in reverse, he eventually will get to the point where he  must undo the privatizations, i. e. transfer the wealth accumulated by the Yuri Somethings back to the government or in other words back to the citizens.  Will this be the point when the film running in reverse becomes jammed and the projector light burns a hole in it?   


Putin knows that if he loses power, he will be arrested for corruption and marched off to spend his remaining years in a Siberian prison.   Important to staying in power is to have the support of the citizens.  I see the undoing of the Soviet Collapse as his way to  curry public favor, as exemplified by the 80% who were surveyed in favor of Putin.   

However, this land grab is risky.  It antagonizes the West, and if Putin pushes too far, the West will reduce its investments in Russia, and that will harm the economy.  Public support will decline quickly if the economy falters.

[siberia]

Putin's Daughter flees her $3.3 Million dollar home in Amsterdam.


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/vladimir-putin-daughter-flees-netherlands-home-article-1.1879616


Dutch Mayor calls for Putin's daughter to be deported..


http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/mayor-dutch-town-calls-putin-daughter-deported-netherlands-article-1.1877200