A top Moscow official and his colleagues were directly involved in forcibly deporting Ukrainian children, who were then placed in Russian military training programs, it has been reported.
Steal kids from families and homeland and train them to fight. Humm, what could go wrong with that.
Don’t worry, they can always just call the kids “western agents” when things go pear-shaped
Yeah I wouldn’t want to be the Russians putting rifles in their hands.
Disgusting. Although I’m not surprised.
This is what it means to surrender to Russia. Might save more people short term but sets yourself as Russia’s next badly equipped and badly trained pleb front line.
2014 was already the result of appeasing Russia in 2008. And 2022 was the result of not pushing back hard enough in 2014. Anyone expecting that anything that’s not an humiliating Russian defeat is anything but a short cease fire is off their rocker (and missed all the learnings of how Western European imperialism collapsed, which I find problematic in the case of political leaders).
Muskovy needs to get the Japan/Germany treatment - entirely demilitarized and culturally rewritten from the ground up over three consecutive generations until they’re more associated with absolute pacifism a Muskovite version of anime than anything else. The rest of the RF needs to be culturally rewritten until they don’t even remember what the word “Russian” means other than synonymous with “Nazi”.
That is not what happened to Germany and Japan, that’s what happened to Iraq and Afganistan. The slate was absolutley not wiped clean in Germany or Japan, as much of the institutions, leadership, and even military leadership remained in place. The US was much more interested in getting these particular powers up and running as quickly and strongly as possible so that they could help deter the USSR. The cultural development of those nations was influenced by enjoying great economic support from the US, but they are respectively responsible for their own development.
Compare this to Iraq, which was a relatively modern and stable state kept under control by a despot who had ups and downs in his relationship with the US. That government and society was eradicated, and the Iraqis are still picking up the pieces. I would not say that they benefitted. The same was attempted in Afganistan, but as they don’t depend as much on formal and informal infrastructure to mainstain their society (which is fundamentally different than how Americans or Europeans would structure or define a society), the Taliban was able to utilize its relationships throughout the country to essentially get it back to how it was before. This is the consequence of a slate wipe and an attempted slate wipe.
If the US did to Russia what they did to Iraq, I think that would cause a more dangerous situation than what exists now. Russian society was already wiped out in living memory and we are living through the consequences of that now. As for a better solution, in war all we can hope for is the least bad thing.
Was Russia actually torn down and rebuilt as the USSR? By some accounts the USSR was a grand experiment in building a better world (with seriously flawed execution), and by others it was just a continuation of the Russian empire with a new set of despots at the top. I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle, but it’s damned hard to draw any conclusions when almost everyone who talks about the USSR seems to either have too limited a perspective to see the big picture, or to have a vested interest in pushing a certain narrative.
The collapse I was talking about was actually the dissolution of the USSR and the turmoil which resulted from that in the 90s. This is a pretty clear crisis in which the old paradigm was eliminated totally and was replaced chaos and economic depression. This crisis seeded the desire for a strongman to set everything right, which was a position filled by Putin.
Ah, that makes more sense. Putin seems to have done a bang-up job of rebuilding Russia as the version of the USSR its harshest critics portray, just missing some territories he’s desperately trying to reconquer.
Unfortunately that’s not really in the cards anymore thanks to nuclear weapons, which have made conventional invasions of nuclear-armed states a dicey proposition, to put it mildly.
Unfucking Russia is likely impossible at this point, at least in time scales less than 100 years. They’ve been brutally violent imperialists for centuries now, and their mentality and public institutions are so fantastically fucked up that fixing them would require a “cold reboot” of a huge chunk of their culture, like you noted, and without popular support inside Russia that’s just never going to happen.
While true as far as military intervention goes, I’m cautiously optimistic about Peter Zeihan’s predictions that its current demographic freefall will help take away their ability to actually man, operate and maintain those systems.
Oh yeah their demographic pyramid isn’t exactly looking healthy, but I doubt they’ll get “better” when that particular shit hits the fan. Might not be able to do mass scale invasions, but they can be pretty inventive when it comes to applying violence and coercion
It’s a large landmass. If their population dips below the point where they can even maintain a coherent government or enforce their will on their colonies, we might be able to watch those same colonies start declaring independence. Hopefully, at least, even if I’m not holding my breath.
Yes, I am looking forward to see all the colonized people free. They are already working toward their freedom: http://freenationsleague.org/ Moreover, due to climate change, there’s going to be a huge northward wave of migration - precisely to the Siberian belt that is becoming warm enough for agriculture.
I’m not exactly looking forward to that; it’d essentially be musical chairs with nukes
AFAIK, the Soviet nuclear missiles have already rusted down in the nuclear shafts - and nuch fewer modern Russian missiles will also rust down without imperial funding. And all the destitute, deprived people of the current empire will at last be free to develop and prosper.
I admire your optimism, but assuming that their strategic deterrence would just quietly fall into pieces before some unsavory vatnik can get their hands on them honestly seems a bit too optimistic.
North Korea has been in free fall for decades, yet they are still the same fucked up gangster state. They don’t give a fuck about their population and see them as property to be used up by the state. Until somebody teaches the population how to resist and replace their form of government, nothing will change. The only thing we can do about these states is to isolate them. Anyone who gives them succor should suffer the same isolation.
Isn’t their country propped up by Russia and China though?
Japan didn’t get that but should have.
Hirohito should have died at the end of a noose.
This won’t backfire at all…
Top-tier evil
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A top Moscow official and his colleagues were directly involved in forcibly deporting Ukrainian children, who were then placed in Russian military training programs, it has been reported.
The independent Russian-language news outlet Vertska said that Alexander Bastrykin, who heads the Russian Investigative Committee in charge of examining serious crimes, helped coerce children into Russia’s cadet corps.
In March, the UN Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine said there was evidence of the illegal transfer of Ukrainian children to Russia and that the forced deportation to areas under Moscow’s control was a war crime.
Verstka said in its report published Sunday that following Putin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, the Investigative Committee “took patronage” over the children taken to Russia from the occupied territories of Ukraine.
It said during the first year of the war, 78 Ukrainian children entered educational institutions, including the cadet corps and academies affiliated with the Investigative Committee, which Newsweek has contacted for comment.
Verstka also said that Bastrykin ordered the cadet corps in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Volgograd to prepare to receive Ukrainian children from the occupied Donbas region as early as February 25, 2022, a day after Russia launched its full-scale invasion.
I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Someone watched Conan The Barbarian and thought it was a sound strategy.
😟
