By my authority as a USA citizen and having worked once with a Ukrainian colleague, I declare that I know the will of the people of Crimea and Donbas and they voted unanimously to become the 51st US state.
WWIII in 2020 Jan 2020: Iran attack: US troops targeted with ballistic missiles https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-51028954 2020 went WWIII, Australian Fires, and then COVID And COVID just never stopped.
Ukraine should sign a deal with the US to build a very large naval base in Crimea. Think of the economic benefits to Ukraine!
Looks like desperation actions from Putin. Crazy how things turned out. 6M ago - Putin is going to steamroll Ukraine in days. 6M later - NATO is expanding, West united against the aggressor, Russia economy in collapse, risk of losing 2014 gain, have to call up a draft and use nuke threat to protect 2014 gain. Spoiler: Good thing Americans are united Trump: Putin is very savvy, smart, a genius. Our leaders are dumb, Nato is dumb.
Pravda says this is the long line of Patriots returning to Russia to volunteer for Russia's special operation.
Protests in St Petersburg. Suddenly Russians care about war... Protests, clashes and arrests in Yekaterinburg. Arrests in Moscow:
WOW - I mean WOW! So you think you can just nuke the queen's funeral with all the heads of the western states there and the world will just back down? WOW - you have no clue dude
Honestly, Russia is a lot like QAnon and the Trump movement. Outrageous conspiracy theories are very popular among the lower and middle class in Russia. It has even become very popular to embrace historians that have no credentials and change history to contain insanely inaccurate things that literally never happened. They are obsessed with the world ending, they tend to invest highly in gold. They have puppet extremist religious leaders that are paraded out to justify everything from hating Jews and gays, to supporting the actions of the government. They have news stations with personalities that are outrageous and claim that their reporting is factual.
Perhaps, anything would've been better than not forgiving their debts and promoting Shock Therapy to a people who mostly lived with a socialistic mentality and didn't understand the true value of the shares of stock they collectively owned. We were definitely influential in their immediate future when they practiced what our economists were preaching to them, all while we dangled IMF loans as carrot. It was a blown opportunity that was easily lost while pundits here took victory laps and declared an end to history.
[Daily Mail] EXCLUSIVE: America WILL retaliate with 'a devastating strike' against Russia's Black Sea Fleet or bases in Crimea if Putin follows through on threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, US Army's former European commander warns
Nothing would have changed if we forgave their debts, the same crooked people would have taken over. This entire "shock therapy" theory continues to ignore how crooked the people in power were in Russia and any Marshall plan money would have been pocketed like everything else. I found this interesting when reading up on shock therapy, I did not know about the voucher thing. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/...ussian-oligarchs-and-paved-the-path-for-putin Privatization was conducted in two waves. The first wave, which began in October 1992, had at least the veneer of being a fair and open process. Russia issued 148 million "privatization checks," or vouchers, to Russian citizens. These vouchers could be freely sold or traded. They could then be used to buy shares of state enterprises going private at public auctions around the nation. It was like the former Soviet Union was holding the world's largest garage sale and vouchers were the tickets to shop. The people on their way to becoming Russia's first class of oligarchs scoured the nation, trying to buy as many vouchers as they could. Many of the oligarchs had come from nothing. They had initially gotten rich — but not quite buy-superyachts rich just yet — by hustling in the black market or through legitimate businesses when the Soviet Union first allowed private entrepreneurship in the late 1980s. For example, Roman Abramovich made his first pot of money selling rubber ducks and other random objects to Russians out of his Moscow apartment (seriously). He was also a mechanic. By the time privatization began, many soon-to-be oligarchs owned banks and had enough money to buy lots of vouchers. The oligarchs went on a buying spree, purchasing hundreds of thousands of vouchers, each of which were worth 10,000 rubles, or about $40 or less back in the 1990s. Average Russians, who were struggling during hyperinflation, were often eager to sell. After amassing vouchers, the oligarchs — both come-up-from-nothing hustlers and former Soviet government insiders — used them at auctions to buy up stocks in newly private companies. By all accounts, many of these enterprises were shockingly undervalued — and those who were able to get large chunks of lucrative enterprises became fabulously wealthy in a very short period of time. Between 1992 and 1994, about 15,000 state-run enterprises went private under the program. By 1994, when the voucher program ended, around 70 percent of the Russian economy had been privatized. But some of the biggest, most valuable industries remained in the government's hands. Chubais had plans to privatize these state enterprises and raise much needed funds for the government by selling them off for cash to the highest bidder in legitimate auctions. However, politics got in the way of the increasingly unpopular privatization drive — and even threatened to reverse it. That's when the Yeltsin administration resorted to a much shadier form of privatization.
