White House directs officials to draft proposal to lift US sanctions on Russia
Sources say work on so-called ‘options paper’ comes as Trump seeks to restore Moscow ties and end Ukraine war
www.theguardian.com
Ukraine
- Thread starter Silvanus
- Start date
www.theguardian.com
Well, have to trade with their enemies if they are having trade wars with their allies.Ah, that's some good, classic Krasnov.White House directs officials to draft proposal to lift US sanctions on Russia
Sources say work on so-called ‘options paper’ comes as Trump seeks to restore Moscow ties and end Ukraine war
All that means is that it's less sophisticated. Not less tight.
The same party; the same man! Not like here where there are two parties captured by the same interests which have lively debate about conservative Christian shibboleths, whether segregation should return, and some minor details of tax policy (but nothing that threatens the empire).
Like the Democratic Party/Labour Party, yes. Lively debate within a narrow spectrum, no debate or hearing outside it.
The platform of the CPRF, despite its several instances of what appears to be tailism, is still more radical than the Labour Party manifesto under Corbyn (either time, though admittedly it is also less concrete) or any platform of the Democratic Party ever. All you seem to be arguing here is that Russia is not better than the United States in these regards. Which does not at all contradict what I've written on the matter.
Russia has an "opposition in name only" (according to you), the United States has the uniparty, the ratchet effect, the controlled opposition-- whatever you want to call it, you have 'Labour' giving you austerity and privatization painted red. These are all essentially the same thing.
Yeah, they would never protest. Wouldn't be tolerated.
2021 Russian election protests - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Oh. But I bet they weren't wearing pink at the time! That would be too daring.
You could have googled "CPRF protest" like I just did before stupidly and pointlessly overextending your analysis with your own inventions. Good thing the internet exists, I was prepared to believe that they were too chickenshit to performatively kneel in kente cloth like Nancy Pelosi just because you said so!
If in one country your votes are counted and in the other they aren't, then control is tighter in the latter. If in one country you can publish independent media and in the other you can't, then control is tighter in the latter. The stretched definitions and mental gymnastics required to create an equivalence here are obvious.
I'm sorry that the American Overton window is firmly on the right, but that's not the same thing as an actual dictatorship.
Riiight, except those parties have actually taken power and implemented policies their opponents were staunchly against. In Russia, the Communist Party has never been allowed within a thousand feet of power.
You're again merely moaning that there exists a political orthodoxy in the West, and that the Overton window is kind of narrow. No shit! To imagine that's the same thing as having no independent media or opposition is rank naivety.
Good lord, man, and that's the best you can find! A few hundred people turn out to protest... specifically about the election being rigged, as I've been saying and you've been disputing. Up to a full quarter of them are fucking arrested. Then nothing happens, the fake election results stand, and protests evaporate. Coolsies.Yeah, they would never protest. Wouldn't be tolerated.
2021 Russian election protests - Wikipedia
Oh. But I bet they weren't wearing pink at the time! That would be too daring.
You could have googled "CPRF protest" like I just did before stupidly and pointlessly overextending your analysis with your own inventions. Good thing the internet exists, I was prepared to believe that they were too chickenshit to performatively kneel in kente cloth like Nancy Pelosi just because you said so!
It's also quite notable that you didn't cite the largest protests from the same year, the Jan-April ones, which attracted tens of thousands objecting to....Navalny's imprisonment. After which over 10,000 people were detained and arrested, the organisations involved were liquidated, & riot police brutalised people. And the CPRF supported the government in the crackdown. Now I wonder why that one didn't make the cut?
That isn't unalike, but in many ways also not alike.
Anyhoo, I suppose that Canada will be sending less aid to Ukraine for a while, due to concerns about being invaded by a country under Putin's control itself.
Of the last 4 US presidents, the only president that hasn't seen Russia invade Ukraine while in office is Trump.
No but Trump openly dividing the trans Atlantic alliance was probably why Putin thought the west would be too divided to help Ukraine. That and when doing the preparations Putin likely thought Trump would win.
Trump has always been an asset to Putin’s plans for Ukraine, never an obstacle. As we can all see right now.
The difference is that describing either of those parties as "controlled opposition" is, at its most generous, figurative. More accurately though, it's simply wrong. The labour party is not currently in opposition. The democratic party was not in opposition from 2021 until this year. If the opposition can win elections, if they can form a government and enact policies, then they are not actually controlled unless you want to regress fully into a deep state shadow government world of pure imagination.
When the CPRF is described as controlled opposition, it's a literal statement. The CPRF do not win elections because elections in Russia are rigged. They do not get to actually form governments or enact any of their policies unless those policies happen to non-coincidentally resemble those of the current government (which suspiciously, they often do). They are allowed to occupy positions of nominal authority within institutions and bodies which do not actually exercise any real political power.
That is the difference. That is why there is so little enforcement regarding their rhetoric, because it literally does not matter. The boundaries of political acceptability within the labour party or the democratic party are internally enforced and frequently contested. This enforcement happens because there are actual consequences to the positions those parties hold. Those positions may one day translate into actual policy. The CPRF does not have policy. It only has rhetoric.
Last edited:
Indeed. As is pointed out by Trump and many of his supporters, Putin didn't attack Ukraine while Trump was in office.
What this neglects to consider is that Putin didn't invade Ukraine whilst Trump was in office not because Trump was strong, but because Trump was weak and thus would leave Russia much more freedom to pursue its interests.
* * *
The idea that there's a useful deal to be signed with Russia in its current state is... genuinely insane. Perhaps people have forgotten, but this is what the West - primarily Europe - tried in the 2000s and 2010s. Russia happily took our money, invested a lot of it back in operations to undermine our societies, then used gas supplies as leverage. That's Putin's Russia, and every dollar the USA sends Russia will go to the same. Russia's not going to drop its strategic alliances with the USA's other opposition like China and Iran.
The other possibility is that Trump wants nothing in particular out of Russia, he just wants to mug Ukraine. Trump and Putin have stitched up that Putin gets anywhere from what Russia has currently taken to full control of all five oblasts Russia has claimed and declaring victory, it's just a case of then forcing Ukraine to give the USA huge sums of money. To do this, Trump therefore pushes Ukraine to near-certain battlefield defeat so that it has to surrender, at which point the USA will step in and demand its pound of flesh to stop Russia taking it over.
A second night of intensified Russian bombardment of civilian areas following the US withdrawal of intelligence-sharing. Ballistic missiles fired at a residential apartment complex, and then further bombing launched when emergency services turned up.
www.theguardian.com
Russia launches devastating attack on Ukraine after Trump’s defence of Putin
Latest attacks came hours after Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin was ‘doing what anybody would do’
www.theguardian.com
People may have heard that a Russian spy ring in the UK has been exposed and on trial recently. It turns out they were tasked by Russian security services with murdering Roman Dobrakhotov, the editor of The Insider, and the investigative journalist who revealed the identities of the Russian assassins who attempted to murder Sergei Skripal in 2018. You may remember those assassins also poisoned several British civilians.
The ring discussed burning Dobrokhotov alive, spraying him with acid, or using ricin.
www.theguardian.com
But sure, the suppression of independent reporting is no tighter in Russia than anywhere else.
The ring discussed burning Dobrokhotov alive, spraying him with acid, or using ricin.
‘Burn him alive on the street’: the Russian journalist targeted in UK by spy ring tasked with his murder
Old Bailey trial of six Bulgarians charged with espionage has provided chilling evidence that Kremlin wanted reporter to be killed
www.theguardian.com
But sure, the suppression of independent reporting is no tighter in Russia than anywhere else.
No, it is precisely accurate. They are there to absorb and channel energy from popular discontent in ways that serve (or at least don't threaten) the empire. Doesn't matter whether they are regarded as "in power" or not because they aren't the ones making the important decisions either way. So yes, the Labour Party is not formally in opposition as of somewhat recently. They're so captured it doesn't even matter whether they are "in power" or "in opposition"; the continuity between Tories and Red Tories is far greater than the difference. Same, perhaps even moreso, with the Democrats.
Are you sure you are not describing Western independent media?
That was the first google result. The second one was a series of protests in and around 2012. Notably, your murderous Islamophobic favorite Navalny's "Smart Voting" app told people to vote for the CPRF in areas in which it was polling first or second against United Russia. So evidently he didn't think they were captured by Putin, or at least not enough to consider them the same as United Russia.
There is a very simple answer for that, though still quite profound: it is because 'CPRF' doesn't appear in media discussing it with enough frequency to put it near the top of results for 'CPRF protest'. Interestingly, you could have Google searched 'CPRF protest' after I explicitly mentioned it and avoided needing this and the fact that there are other protests the CPRF has been involved in to be explained to you. Here is the seventh result:
But anyway, you do appear to be correct (although I can't say I give enough of a shit about Navalny to look closely) that they didn't participate in protests about the imprisonment of someone convicted of asking British intelligence for money to finance the overthrow of the Russian government. So it was definitely not a controversial matter; obviously any party that has any independence whatsoever would agree with your insular opinion. Independence is measured by agreement with Silvanus and the US Department of State.
The labour party is there because just over a century ago a collection of trade union and socialist movements decided to form a political party in order to pursue their political goals through electoral means because they (correctly) recognized that expansion of the political franchise had created a situation where the vast majority of the voting population were now working class and thus likely to be sympathetic to socialist policies.
I want you to tell me at what point in the decision making process someone made the decision that the Labour party should exist to "absorb and channel energy from popular discontent in ways that serve (or at least don't threaten) the empire". Who made that decision?
For that matter, which "empire" are we talking about? The Empire was not a figurative concept for British people in 1899, they lived in the metropole of an actual real empire that actually existed. The idea that the labour party was formed to suppress anti-Imperialist sentiment is fucking laughable. Anti-Imperialism barely existed as a concept. Heart of Darkness came out in the exact same year as the Labour Representative Comittee was established and immediately bombed because noone understood what the point was.
So who are the ones making "important decisions" and what decisions have they actually made?
Reptilians? Jews? The Cabal? The Illuminati? Kanye West?
I really, really do not like the current leadership of the labour party, but part of why I don't like them is because they've spent much of recent history sabotaging their own party out of some bizarre paranoid delusion that it has been infiltrated by Trotskyites. If they were controlled opposition, then they're doing a shit job. They are openly divisive, they've pissed off the majority of their party membership and at the end of the day they're extremely fucking cringe. But part of why they're so cringe is that they're actually sincere. They do have deep political convictions, those convictions just happen to be confused liberal nonsense.
But being the product of a toxic political culture and a flawed political system does not make you controlled opposition. Neither does being cringe.
More fool me for thinking you might be willing to put more effort in, then. A paltry few hundred turned out, up to a full quarter were arrested, and you seem to think that's emblematic of a healthy protest culture.
Are you entirely beholden to the order in which search results appear on Google or what Twitter feeds you? The protests in which the CPRF got involved (on the protesters' side) were minuscule little affairs, whereas they sided with the government on large-scale ones. And when thousands turned out, as they did for the Jan-April protests, thousands were arrested and riot police brutalised civilians in the streets.
& here you continue to pretend protest is tolerated in Russia.
Or perhaps: parties with an actual measure of independence wouldn't consistently side with the government they're supposedly opposing whenever it matters, & provide their legislative support to the government's agenda on anything of significance. If you always stand with the government when it matters, you ain't opposition in a meaningful sense.
Last edited:
Trump administration to resume military aid to Ukraine and intelligence sharing
The attack came as a Ukrainian delegation was set to meet with America’s top diplomat in Saudi Arabia about ending the three-year war with Russia.
apnews.com
Jesus Christ, it never stop changing. Its not even flooding with shit anymore. Its everything everywhere all at once.
It's pretty chaotic, at minimum.
Assuming organised intent, it does make it look like it was a very crude attempt to strong-arm Ukraine into conceding to US demands. Presumably this attempt has now either succeeded or failed and so normal service can be resumed. Alternatively that Russia was able to exploit it sufficiently effectively that the USA had to restore support in case Ukraine suffered too catastrophic a setback - the USA can't take any winnings if Ukraine collapses.
I am of the opinion that Trump is not so beholden to Russian interests that he would just deliver Russia a win for Russia's sake. I think he looks for whom he can bully, extort and con for short term gain with very little long-term consideration. He just thinks he can gouge Ukraine to the max, plus probably some revenge for his first term and some affinity for Putin. Handing Russia a major win and long-term strategic advantage in the process of gouging is mostly incidental. As is the fact that he is burning down alliances and trust in the USA, possibly irrevocably in some quarters. He doesn't appear to understand that they mean anything. Of course they don't mean anything to him, because he's not the sort of person that cares about anything but himself.
And Trump's supporters crow about how he's "playing 5-D chess" while he sits there swallowing the checkers.
Trump administration to resume military aid to Ukraine and intelligence sharing
The attack came as a Ukrainian delegation was set to meet with America’s top diplomat in Saudi Arabia about ending the three-year war with Russia.
Jesus Christ, it never stop changing. Its not even flooding with shit anymore. Its everything everywhere all at once.
Sure, if they also think that a guy who stops them in the street, holds a knife up to their throat and demands their wallet is a criminal mastermind.
No they hadn't. They temporarily stopped offensive, not defensive intel sharing. They won't let you put a bullseye on a T-80 BVM tank in a hull down position for F-16s, but will let you know where to destroy Shahed drones that are coming to Ukrainian cities.A second night of intensified Russian bombardment of civilian areas following the US withdrawal of intelligence-sharing. Ballistic missiles fired at a residential apartment complex, and then further bombing launched when emergency services turned up.
Russia launches devastating attack on Ukraine after Trump’s defence of Putin
Latest attacks came hours after Donald Trump said Vladimir Putin was ‘doing what anybody would do’
The US military is not an unlimited resource, I would rather they deter this....
Type 004 aircraft carrier - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Then this.
Plus Europe minus the UK is too far away from Taiwan for it to matter to them geographically. Their navies (again minus the UK and possibly France) is too underequipped to deal with the PLAN.
Can Europe Fight for Taiwan? - War on the Rocks
Should a war erupt with China over Taiwan, many observers seem to think that Europe would be largely irrelevant as far as the actual fighting is
warontherocks.com