Quote from: paxmao on January 30, 2024, 10:21:30 AM

Quote from: DaRude on January 29, 2024, 06:27:55 PM

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I'll bite, which countries you've been to that have been devastated by the Russians? All i can think of is Abkhazia and South Ossetia but they're not countries and i doubt you've been there. And it's hard to say those regions are devastated as compared to Georgia. And then for comparison, how many countries have you been to that were devastated by the US? What would you say is the ration of countries devastated by Russia vs number of countries devastated by the US? And how does devastation by soft power compare to devastation by hard power long term? Have you been to Cuba?

Re-read your own posts and do not say that you are not seeking a reaction when making 3 or 4 biased questions in a row.

To the topic, Ruzzia does exert hard and soft power at leisure - has been doing it forever to keep an empire of nations that they even call "blacks" in the same racist sense you could use the "nigg**" word in the US or "Paki" in UK, etc... They have intervened in conflicts all over Africa, they have invaded Ukraine and have smashed the would be nations around them.

Quote from: suchmoon on January 30, 2024, 01:16:38 PM

Quote from: DaRude on January 29, 2024, 06:00:59 PM

suchmoon can you rephrase your question? I get the gist is that i wasn't supposed to ask what countries he has been to that were devastated by Russians?

Sure you can ask. It's just that as with all your "questions" the only reason you're doing this is so that you could bury it in a pile of fallacies... "these weren't really countries"... "you've only been to 2 countries so the other 198 haven't been devastated"... "it was USSR not Russia"... "they would have been worse off if US did it"... am I right?

Despite the obvious facts of how e.g. half of Europe was fucked by Russia for 45 years after WWII, you will continue to deny everything.

Point being all world powers exert soft and hard power to control and expand their spheres of influences, some do it more, some less. Any attempt to claim that Russia devastated Africa is just laughable. Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili a true Russian native right, but who cares lets just blame evil Putin for what USSR did too.
When spheres of influences are clearly misaligned (considering proximity and integration) the transitions are natural and usually mostly painless (like when USSR fell apart). But this obviously was not that case with Ukraine, it's right on a boarder with Russia and was almost fully integrated with Russia, language, religion, intermarriage, etc etc etc.... Now the big question, when the decision was made to attempt to take Ukraine from Russia with soft power (cookies) do you think people making the decision were so incompetent (criminal negligence) that they were so wrong and couldn't predict current outcome, or the decision was made with full knowledge (with think tanks, research institutes etc...) they were fully aware of the probability of the current outcome and still decided to make the call despite this? A shame that it'll take dozens of years before all of the interesting goverment communications are declassified.

Back from 2014 US coup in Ukraine and the "Fuck the EU" claim from the US diplomats/delegation in Ukraine

Quote from: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

7 February 2014

Jonathan Marcus: An intriguing insight into the foreign policy process with work going on at a number of levels: Various officials attempting to marshal the Ukrainian opposition; efforts to get the UN to play an active role in bolstering a deal; and (as you can see below) the big guns waiting in the wings - US Vice-President Joe Biden clearly being lined up to give private words of encouragement at the appropriate moment.
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Nuland: So on that piece Geoff, when I wrote the note [US vice-president's national security adviser Jake] Sullivan's come back to me VFR [direct to me], saying you need [US Vice-President Joe] Biden and I said probably tomorrow for an atta-boy and to get the deets [details] to stick. So Biden's willing.

Biden and Jake Sullivan were involved in this from the start, and we're currently witnessing political opponent (Trump) fully exploiting this. Think at this point everyone knows what happens next...