A pro Russian commenter on Yahoo (about 12,500 comments compared to my 63) has been doing his homework. He told me to go back to the other forum and annoy "Smart Martin". Either he is one of us here or he has been looking at the archives.
9 days ago, I posted "Aleksandr Borodai -- Russian citizen, PR consultant, and 'Prime Ministe' of the 'Donetsk People's Republic' -- has flown to Moscow "for consultations" and will return to Donetsk 'in a few days.' Any bets on the return to Donetsk of this heroic freedom fighter?"
I just read that he has resigned his "post". No doubt, he will be deeply missed in Ukraine.
The only thing that really surprises me is that the people in Russia seem to just go along with what ever he says or does! Like lambs to the slaughter.”
Here is a good read on why many Russian people will believe whatever the state tells them.Excerpt below
The results of that truth-deficit are, now, much with us.
As David Satter demonstrates in a book that ought to be essential reading for Western political leaders today, Russia has never come to grips with its Communist past. The title of Satter’s study — It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway – captures the essence of the contemporary Russian sickness: historical amnesia and denial, leading to systemic and internalized misrepresentation of the past, and thence to falsification of the present. The crimes of the Soviet past have never been publicly examined, much less repented. Millions of victims of Communist terror and murder have been forgotten. There has been no public confrontation with the questions, How did this happen in the first place? And, What allowed it to continue? Denazification was regarded as essential to German rehabilitation after the collapse of the Hitler regime; no such attempt to reckon with the Communist past has taken place in Russia, in part because the West, playing the good sport after 1991, did not help facilitate it. Thus Vladimir Putin’s laments for lost Soviet “glory” are not dismissed as the ravings of a warped mind (and soul); they are applauded, as are his attempts to re-create a simulacrum of Stalin’s empire under the rubric of “New Russia” or a recovered and reconstituted “Russian space.”
Satter sums up the diagnosis at the end of his chilling book:
Russia today is haunted by words that have been left unsaid, sites that have not been acknowledged, and mass graves that have been commemorated partially or not at all. In the years since the fall of the Soviet Union, there has been little attempt to understand the Soviet period or to draw inspiration from those, like Andrei Sakharov, who stressed that what Russian society needed was a new morality. The failure to face the moral implications of the communist experience, however, has meant that real change in Russia was not possible. The psychology of state domination was left intact to influence the new post-communist Russia.
That psychology, it might be suggested, is what has predisposed vast numbers of Russians — a considerable majority, on the available evidence — to believe the Big Lies that have characterized the Putin regime’s propaganda about the Maidan revolution in Ukraine and Russia’s subsequent war on its neighbor. The most recent example of this moral vulnerability to prevarication beggars the imagination. As Julia Ioffe wrote in a recent article on The New Republic’s website, various Russian media outlets, controlled by Putin, have been engaging in conspiracy-mongering with titanic shamelessness. They claim that MH-17 (the Malaysia Airlines flight shot down by a Russian-provided SAM over eastern Ukraine last Thursday night with the loss of 298 lives) was really the seemingly lost MH-370 (the Malaysia Airlines flight that disappeared over the Indian Ocean several months ago). But it didn’t really disappear, the Russian media now say: The plane was taken to the American base at Diego Garcia and hidden there; then it was flown to the Netherlands, loaded with corpses, and flown to Ukraine by autopilot, where it was blown up by a bomb planted aboard. (There are variations: Some media outlets claim that the plane took off from Amsterdam with live pilots, who later bailed out.)
I have been reading about the Great Northern War from the early 1700s and the defection of cossack Ivan Mazepa to the Swedish side. He appeared to have become a somewhat polarizing figure in Ukrainian history. Imagine had Charles XII prevailed, people in Ukraine would be speaking Swedish now. :)
speaking of Chechnya
i was told through a russian media source Puton brought up a brigade regiment or about's of Chechen soldiers to Moscow at the last election.
this was when the anti Puton protests were getting possible out of control over the electoral stuff.
the reasoning i was told the Chechen's absolutely hate Russians in general and wouldn't love anything more then to beat the shit out of Russians,, so for Puton it was better idea sending in Chechen's to subdue then having Russians against Russians.
the protest didn't get to the height where these troops were needed to be deployed.
Putin has made another incredible blunder. Arresting uniformed military officers for performing there duty to defend their country from outside incursion instigated by himself. He will anger and loose respect from every soldier, from every army in the civilized world,,, and yes, including his own. These actions will absolutely cause his loss of credibility within his own circle. He has crossed over and joined the list of usual suspects in history. He is pissing off the very people that may take events over the edge internally or internationally.
I've just been reading about Putin's clampdown on the internet ... I think the guy has "lost it" and he is so nervous now of his position that he's prepared to try anything.
P.S. Be useful though it they can root out some scammers whilst they're clamping down :)
What possible "rules of engagement" can there be unless one is part of a legitimate military force?
These people are terrorists ... Thousands have fled their homes whilst others cower for shelter whilst these muppets wander the streets discharging loaded firearms and driving SAM launchers around the neighbourhood whilst in intoxicated conditions.
Did someone suggest that any of these actions are lawful?
You understand point Martin. No only was he operating un-signified in the onset, be he was identified and then himself proclaimed his position. He and Yanukovych are no longer safe from travel to the civilized world and he may not be safe in Russia.
“BAGHDAD — President Obama is currently meeting privately with his cabinet to discuss the news from Iraq that ISIS has discovered scores of Weapons of Mass Destruction that Saddam Hussein had hidden before the start of the US Invasion in 2003. The UN security council is scheduled to meet for an emergency session.”
“Wikileaks revealed in 2010 that during the occupation of Iraq the U.S. military discovered many small caches of chemical weapons, but others claimed that Russia had helped Hussein hide the most dangerous WMD stockpiles in Syria. The plot took a new twist when Syrian rebels began identifying weapons that came from Iraq last year. Then when Russia began to oversee Assad’s supposed disarmament of chemical weapons John A. Shaw, the former Pentagon official who claims to have tracked Iraq’s WMDs being moved out by Russian special forces, claimed that it was possible some of these chemical weapons were being hid back in Iraq.”
INVASION OF DONBASS BY "HUMANITARIAN" RUSSIAN REGULAR FORCES LIKELY UNDERWAY
Putin has announced that Russia is sending an "aid convoy" into Ukraine's Donbass region, claiming to do so under the auspices of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
Confusingly, a Red Cross humanitarian mission to the Donbass is in the works from the other direction -- from Kharkiv, controlled by the Kyiv government.
For days now, reports have come from western Russia that vehicles of Russia's strong military forces stationed near Ukraine's border were being "decorated" with signs proclaiming their humanitarian purpose.
The Secretary General of NATO said today there is a "high probability" of Russian attack.
If the Red Cross covers Russian troops to take over Ukrainian soil, it will go badly for Red Cross credibility and donations. They have already had trouble with top administrators embezzling funds. They may have to change their name to "The Red Sickle". With opposing forces on the same ground, the rebels my attempt to start a shooting war,,,,, shades of 100 years ago with the beginning of WWI. Putin is walking a line that he has no control over anymore.
I speak with my in laws every day from donetsk. They say that despite a few outages and stores being closed life is pretty much the same. They have gone on vacation twice in the last 6 weeks to Odessa and had no trouble driving in our back out of donetsk. They have heard some explosions but none near by their house.
I have a friend in Donetsk, she lives in fear. She hardly goes out. She is surviving but does not know when a shell could land on her house. She has also travelled recently. She has been asked by Western friends to leave Donetsk, like half of the population has. But she says all her family is there and she has nowhere to go.