xzar_monty

Fair enough, it is complicated. But one thing bothers me a bit: if you haven't had any politicians with determination and guts since Palme, why do you see Sweden as mediators? Mediating requires determination and guts.

Historically, after not being an empire anymore, you have regarded wars as business opportunities for Sweden. Selling huge amounts of iron to the Nazis, and so on. Bofors also has an untarnished reputation as a company that uses bribes, most famously in India.

That would be my guess, too, but I'd like to have it documented with some credibility. Probably not going to happen.

A good list. One thing that is likely to remain a mystery is those apartment bombings (in 1999) that led to the war in Chechnya. Were they coordinated by security services to ensure Putin's rise to power? It would be very much like Putin to bomb his own citizens, but I suppose this is one where we don't know, and won't know.

This, incidentally, is part of the Russian imperial thinking: all area that has ever been part of Russia belongs to Russia, as far as Russia is concerned. Reading the literature on this is quite interesting. For instance, the former Finnish president Mauno Koivisto (good pals with George Bush the elder) wrote a book called Venäjän idea (The Concept/Idea of Russia) in 2001. In it, he points out this same thing and goes on to add, "Thus, for them, we are also part of Russia." And that was in 2001: no illusions even then.

My experience is that the Nordic countries tend to have plenty of decent politicians. Here's a good example: the former foreign and prime minister of Finland tweeting about the war. He makes excellent points in this 10-tweet thread. There's nothing groundbreaking about any of this, but it is good political discourse, nevertheless. I wonder what @kanisathathinks about it. NB: In case anyone wants more information on this guy, it's good for you to know that the Wikipedia article concerning him is A. Stubb.

News about Russia's goals. Interesting if true. Can't read the document itself, so that's a bummer (for me). https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-fake-referendums-russia-draft-document/31828617.html

Fair enough!

Dang, @Gorth, you got there first!

Not very surprising that that comment by Lavrov didn't go down well in Israel: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-61296682 I am not sure if it's true that Lavrov tried to quit a while back (maybe even two years ago, or something), but Putin refused to let him go. If that is true, it is all the more astonishing to see him lie so blatantly and repeatedly during this war.

No need to be sorry, I understand this phenomenon perfectly well (in fact, it's my specialty). It is indeed quite interesting how differently various languages categorize the world. For instance, Spanish and French make no real distinction between house and home (casa means both in Spanish, maison means both in French). English makes no real distinction between family (meaning just your mum and dad and siblings) and family (meaning your relatives including your mum and dad and siblings), or uncle (your mom's brother) and uncle (your dad's brother), whereas plenty of languages do. And so on. It is fascinating.

I can't read the text, but judging by the speed with which they move and turn, clearly they're more boats than ships, isn't that right? Good hits, nevertheless.

I think it's almost impossible to have this confirmed. Russia is supposed to have approximately 1600 deployed missiles ready to be launched. The actual numbers may well be lower, perhaps even a lot lower, but I'm inclined to agree with the military expert referred to above: whatever the number is, it's not something you want to disregard -- even if it is actually quite low.

(Sorry if I'm repeating this but) I read a very interesting point made by a local military expert. He said that we have now seen how badly some of the Russian equipment has worked and how much corruption there is in the army. From this we might conclude that Russia's nuclear threat is nowhere near what we've thought it would be: keeping all that stuff in working order for decades requires a lot of work, and conversely, there's a lot to money be gained via alternative routes (i.e. corruption). As we're talking about a kleptocracy that is inherently untrustworthy and does not work very well, the nuclear weapon question is very much in the air. But of course the fact remains that the threat is not to be disregarded.

Some of these news about Russians pillaging and looting are somewhat sad: it seems so petty of them to do this kind of stuff, especially when you contrast it with Lavrov's demands that help for Ukraine should cease. The attitude is so mad: "we have the God-given(*) right to kill, rape and plunder, but you cannot help our victims". It beggars belief. Here's the piece: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/01/europe/russia-farm-vehicles-ukraine-disabled-melitopol-intl/index.html (*) God-given comes from the church, from Kirill. Incidentally, newspapers and other media outlets put "alleged" in front of pretty much everything, for legal reasons (i.e. a killer's status will remain "alleged" until his sentencing even if everyone knows he did it, and Cristiano Ronaldo will have "allegedly" dropped a cellphone even if you see him do it in the accompanying video clip). It's both silly and funny, but newspapers do it to protect themselves against lawsuits (the classic piece of first advice for a journalist is: "Never call a thief a thief". He's always an alleged thief, if he hasn't been sentenced yet). The English rags don't really qualify as media, and it's really a damned shame there's a lot of people who get their information there.

Small news unlikely to have received wider coverage: a Russian military airplane has breached Swedish airspace. Again. This has happened quite a lot in the past weeks and months. I am not Swedish, but living in the north of Europe, I know very well that Russia is the neighbour from Hell. It's a bully that has no regard for any treaties, agreements or anything. If anyone wants to confront Russia with this knowledge, Russia instantly adopts the victim position and makes noise about how other countries are "unfriendly", or even "hostile" towards Russia.

Yes, I agree. Putin is very much the dictator now -- there is no politburo or anything like that that they used to have in bygone days. The idea of Russia turning into a group or warring factions doesn't sound good, either, by the way. So the future looks fairly bleak over there (and elsewhere).

The Japanese have some serious brutality in their history, this is so true. Reading about the Nanjing Massacre, for instance, isn't likely to increase your appetite. I have little doubt that the potential for extreme brutality lies in nearly all of us. Christopher R. Browning's famous (?) book Ordinary Men gives a chilling description of how the people committing the most awful deeds were, indeed, ordinary men. Also, war, as a phenomenon, brutalizes people. Having said that, Russia still remains an exceptionally brutal and untrustworthy country, and the evidence for that is almost overwhelming. I have recently read from various sources that the collapse of Russia appears more likely than any real change towards a more "western-style" democracy. That remains to be seen. I certainly don't have much hope that Russia changes -- or that it even has any interest in considering change. We have seen that even if ordinary people in Russia suffer and die (from poverty, malnutrition, whatever), that won't affect the thinking of the ones in power. Clearly, at the moment, there is no regard for the Russian soldiers dying on the Ukrainian front, they are cannon-fodder.

Speaking of barbarians, it is astonishing to read the reports of Russian soldiers having defecated all over the floors in the areas they occupied -- or how "on their way out, Russian soldiers scrawled profane messages on the walls — in human excrement" (The New York Times). This is a mirror image of what they did in one of the monasteries they famously occupied way way back. They used the altar and the area around the altar as the place do to their big business. The altar was valuable for the owners, so precisely that was the place to be tarnished and soiled as thoroughly as possible. @Zoraptor: I wholeheartedly agree with what you say of the various misdeeds of the British. And looking at the Middle-East, for instance, both Britain and the US have made some awful decisions in just the past one hundred years -- awful both in their cynicism and their violent results (which took some time to emerge). However, I still think that when we consider "all of history", to the extent that we know it, Russia ranks among the most violent, brutal, cynical and untrustworthy entities we have ever seen, both internally and internationally -- i.e. both in how it treats its own and how it treats others. We don't have to agree on this.

I have no doubt of this. But that is not "everywhere", as I'm sure you'll agree. Also, why would I browse those? Cannot see a more total waste of time.

Here's a salient and worrying point: some of the anti-western attitude in the west comes from the fact that people have had it too easy and don't know of anything else. It is an interesting fact of life that if everything is too comfortable, people can turn into whiners who lose perspective. Not pointing this at anyone on this forum, but the phenomenon is there. Once you've had experience of a society where dissidents are actually and actively hunted and killed, or where people are randomly carried away and never seen again, you get to appreciate the divide between such a society and "the west" a lot more. (And yes, this has recently happened in Argentina, Chile, Spain and other places, too, not just Russia. But Russia has a particularly long history of it, and it still goes on.)

What you say here does not sound convincing. You originally spoke about "the sort of people who think all Russians are braindead and lack critical reasoning proceeding to believe and repeat without question" the stuff presented by their own government officials. When certain media publish this stuff, it does not imply belief, although I do agree that simple repetition of it does not look very convincing, either. But we are talking about certain media, we are not talking about "everywhere" and "for everything". Interestingly, the war has highlighted the quality of various media outlets and the lack of quality in various other media outlets. Your original point that I objected to, the one that gets repeated in the paragraph above, may carry some weight in the sense that there probably are people like that (there are all kinds of people), but I haven't seen evidence of this phenomenon being noticeable.

Essentially it will come down to a choice between Russia and the EU for Serbia. And therein lies a problem of sorts: if Serbia wants Russia, it will be very happily accepted, but if it chooses the EU, there's no certainty that it will be accepted.

There is no limit. Here's an earlier and a more wide-scale example. There can be no trust in the Russians. https://www.newsweek.com/evacuation-route-offered-fleeing-ukrainians-mined-1685418

Do you see this happening, though? Where have you seen unquestioning acceptance of any government officials?