Officially, No.
I figure its like the Navy is the posh older brother, and the Marines are the rougher and paradoxically bigger, little brother.
Every now and again, I've had someone who happened to be a veteran get shitty with me and pull the veteran card to try and shut me up. "I served in the Marines, damnit!" My response was typically, "Oh, I'm sorry, were you not smart enough for the Navy?"
Anyone who tries to pull rank like that is a fucking idiot and honestly I'd have reacted the same way.
I'm not sure I'd use "Posh" to describe the Navy. Unless by that you mean "We have better stuff and more funding", in which case yes.
Its relative really. I think I associate the Navy with 'posh' because I read and watched Hornblower so while I know that rank and file sailors really can be rank, there were also loads of would be blue bloods who used the word 'sir' like it was a comma or a full stop. Or would describe two argumentative colleagues as 'Two men who could not agree on the colour of an orange'. Where I feel a Marine would call them both 'cranky bastards'.
In that case, sure. In context, yeah, it makes sense, especially since in the Olde timey Royal Navy(the British Army was similar) you pretty much had to be well off to afford an officer commission(and by god were those expensive and limited), which often implied nobility(which also meant you were probably educated). Whereas now you basically just need a 4 year degree to apply for an officer position, at least as far as the USN is concerned, so there's less blue blood-ness in the USN. I'd also mention that, unlike armies(and navies) of a century or so ago, the military isn't seen as a prestigious career for someone who is from a rich family as it once was, at least not in the US.
You can go to officer training school in the British armed forces and skip straight in around, oh, lieutenant or captain or something. Which, in a sort of a way, might not be a million miles away from the idea of buying a commission. It certainly allows for a degree of exclusiveness, with entry requirements that may de facto disqualify a certain proportion of the less desirable working class.
That's true in the US military as well. You can apply to one of the military academies and if you get in, you'll do a 4 year college/miliary program before being commissioned as an officer. Or you can have a college degree, and then go to a 3 month officer candidates school before getting commissioned.
Nah, not really. You know as well as I do the US is more than happy to work with kleptocrats, fascists, and neofascists so long as they're the lowest bidder and/or best represent US interests abroad, and keep their...proclivities...underneath at least a vestigial facade of deniability. Though nowadays even that's a stretch, given the entirety of US mass media has been propagandized over the past decade, and the US population is the most credulous on the planet.
No argument here with regards to the motivations and (lack of) red lines of the US. But if you're opining that the fired officials are linked to fascist paramilitaries (though there's precious little evidence of anything beyond bogstandard profiteering), and also that they were fired at the US's request, then that's the functional conclusion that rises from those premises: that the US would therefore have done more to "denazify" than Russia.
Depends how likely Ukraine is to implode at war's end. Do you expect the Azov movement or Right Sector to simply lay down arms and peacefully coexist with ethnically-Russian Ukrainians once the war's over, however it might? Least of all after eight years of war they helped perpetuate (and feeding Putin his precious casus belli), and now that they've been handed all the first-world weaponry and materiel they would ever need? When basically their whole-ass stated goal is to ethnically cleanse Ukraine of Russians?
Well, considering Russia uses "Red Line(s)" like every other week, maybe we shouldn't be shocked if Russia eventually nukes itself 7 times.
www.cnbc.com
Considering they number a scant couple of thousand at the very highest estimates (and even then they were since decimated during the battle of Mariupol, almost certainly leaving them in the hundreds), and they attempted precisely nothing significant on a national scale between Russia's invasion in 2014 and Russia's latest invasion, I'd call this far-fetched, if not intentionally overblown for war propaganda purposes.
So what's your actual end goal here?
english.elpais.com
Because the people of those regions are so keen on becoming part of Russia, amirite?Russia plans to build 25 prisons and three forced labor camps in occupied areas of Ukraine
The Russian prime minister has ordered the construction of a large network of prisons to control the population in the illegally annexed territories
Zelensky has stated that he envisions post-war Ukraine to be modeled more on Israel than the EU, which sounds just swell for human rights.
