I used to lurk on r/AskRussia, and in the run up to the invasion most of the Russians there (who may or may not be representative of Russians in general, I dunno) were confidently saying that there was no way Russia was going to invade Ukraine, it was unthinkable they’d do that to their brothers and neighbours, and it was just Western propaganda. When the invasion happened they were in complete shock, you could tell that many of them felt completely ashamed of their government, at the lies, and that they’d believed them.
As an ethnic russian living in Germany this was exactly the way I felt. But afaik this sadly does not reflect the general russian population. I think people have always less problems to accept more lies than to accept that they have been fooled.
We all need to remember online spaces like reddit generally lean younger and more liberal. We never really get a holistic view of any situation. Just as people on reddit would say “we didn’t want trump” and the response was “clearly over half of you did” from europeans, this is another example of how we have to realize we are in our own little bubble in these online communities.
just wanted to point out trump lost the popular vote
However, most Americans worship the document that allows the loser of the popular vote to win the election regardless as if it was a holy writ.
I haven’t actually asked everyone, but I’m pretty sure that most Americans want to change that part.
That’s somewhat debatable, though, considering Trump won by electoral votes but lost the popular vote by about 2%. The percentage of votes cast by eligible voters was also only something like 57-60%, so it’s more like 27.5% of eligible voters directly voted for Trump (if I calculated that correctly).
While I agree, that is still a shitton of people who voted for an orangutan.
When will tankies learn that there’s no brotherhood amongst facsists… It’s like “Thanks for killing the dissenters, now back in the salt mines!”
We need more of this sort of dreading up of the recent past. I remember this was not an uncommon statement at the time, but all of a sudden its like everyone is trying to gaslight us into a different past.
I’m pretty sure Russia never understood the cultural link between Russians & Ukr.
They obviously never learned the three things in life you don’t fuck with:
- Mother Nature
- Mother-in-laws
- Motherfucking Ukrainians
(The Italian job)
Always bugged the shit out of me that he actually says “mother freaking” in that scene
Completely ruined my suspension of disbelief and I still cringe when remembering it.
Dude, they’re just not that into you.
And he posted it 7 years after the invasion started.
More a case of “confidently lying”
More likely a case of “confidently being paid to lie”
I don’t think he was lying just extremely arrogant who wouldn’t want to be apart of the great Russian empire
Wasn’t this the same thing that Ukraine was saying in the lead-up to the invasion though? Maybe not the “join the Russians before they shoot a brother” part, but saying that the invasion wouldn’t happen. It’s been a year and a half, but I thought it was the US sounding the alarm bells in the run-up to the invasion, while everyone else was saying it wasn’t going to happen.
Ukraine had been preparing for this invasion since Crimea 2014, so they were definitely not saying that
Merkel played Putin for a fool with the Minsk treaty. Putin was dishonest in accepting the treaty, he always planned for a larger scale landgrab later on and started preparing for it. What he didn’t see coming was that the west, especially Merkel (these two really hated each others guts) saw right through his lies and NATO started preparing Ukraine for the coming invasion. Add to this the lies and corruption of the russian agents in Ukraine, who pocketed funds meant to prepare the landgrab by paying off locals, and you have the gigantic failure the planned “one week special military operation” has become.
Merkel was happily making Germany reliant on Russian gas.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 and Merkel pushed for NS2 afterwards.
Merkel is absolutely not some NATO saviour.
Well the gas thing is complicated. Nearly every middle european country heavily relied on russian gas bc it was so damn cheap and gave them a competitive advantage. Europe was like a junkie on the needle “oh its not so bad nothing will happen”. But the invasion was a wake up call, and action was taken. There is still much to do, dont get me wrong, but we have come a long way. Russian invasion finally paved the way to collective european action and acquisitions on the gas market and that has helped to prevent blackouts (that Russia no doubt wanted) and tame the insane prices we had for a while a little. Thing is, there isnt many good reliable options for the amounts of gas europe needs. Norway stepped in big time (and they are the only really reliable and democratic country delivering large quantities). Middle east countries come with their own problems and unreliablities and american LNG is very expensive bc of transport (and building LNG terminals in the capacity now required takes time). In the long run, we just need to use less fossil fuels and more renewables, but that cant be done in a year or even 10 years.
