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[poppedcollar69]

didn't see a thread on it yet. well written piece that gives some context about the us russo relations over the past 30 or so years

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war

Putin's resentment of the West, and his corresponding ambition to establish an anti-Western conservatism, is rooted in his experience of decline and fall—not of Communist ideology, which was never a central concern of his generation, but, rather, of Russian power and pride. Putin, who was born in 1952, grew up in Leningrad, where, during the Second World War, Nazi troops imposed a nine-hundred-day siege that starved the city. His father was badly wounded in the war. Putin joined the K.G.B. in 1975, when he was twenty-three, and was eventually sent to East Germany.

Posted in one of the grayest of the Soviet satellites, Putin entirely missed the sense of awakening and opportunity that accompanied perestroika, and experienced only the state's growing fecklessness. At the very moment the Berlin Wall was breached, in November, 1989, he was in the basement of a Soviet diplomatic compound in Dresden feeding top-secret documents into a furnace. As crowds of Germans threatened to break into the building, officers called Moscow for assistance, but, in Putin's words, ”Moscow was silent."

Putin returned to Russia, where the sense of post-imperial decline persisted. The West no longer feared Soviet power; Eastern and Central Europe were beyond Moscow's control; and the fifteen republics of the Soviet Union were all going their own way. An empire shaped by Catherine the Great and Joseph Stalin was dissolving.

In speeches and interviews, Putin rarely mentions any sense of liberation after the fall of Communism and the Soviet Union; he recalls the nineteen-nineties as a period of unremitting chaos, in which Western partners tried to force their advantages, demanding that Russia swallow everything from the eastward expansion of nato to the invasion of its Slavic allies in the former Yugoslavia. This is a common narrative, but it ignores some stubborn facts. The West welcomed Russia into the G-8 economic alliance. The violence in the Balkans was the worst in Europe since the end of the Second World War and without intervention would likely have dragged on. And Russian security concerns were hardly the only issue at stake with respect to the expansion of nato; Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries in the region were now sovereign and wanted protection.

”It just felt to me grotesquely unfair, if that word can be used in geopolitics, that yet again the Central Europeans were going to be screwed," Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton's leading adviser on Russia and the region, said. ”To tell them they had to live in a security limbo because the Russians would have hurt feelings and be frightened just didn't hold water." Nevertheless, American politicians did worry about how reordering the economic and security arrangements of Europe would affect a fallen power and would-be partner. Clinton and his advisers were aware that reactionary political forces in Russia—the so-called ”red-brown coalition" of diehard Communists and resurgent nationalists—viewed the United States as exploitative and triumphalist and hoped to gain control of the state.

 

[Lautaro]

I saw recently a video about Russia's history and it seems to me that Putin is basically reviving the same conflict that Russia has with Europe since the times of the French revolution. Its not about Communism vs Capitalism, is about Autocracy vs Liberalism (the european kind).

 

[Lord Frieza]

It's a great article, honestly, and I think it gives a rare insight in Putin and why he's doing what he's doing: trying to recapture a past that is gone. He's basically wrecking his entire countries economy, his country's people, and creating a mess of everything to recapture a time when Russia was great. I wonder if he realizes he's probably going to end up destroying Russia in the end, or if the idea has just lapsed so much over the reality that he doesn't care anymore.

 

[Haly]

It's a great article, honestly, and I think it gives a rare insight in Putin and why he's doing what he's doing: trying to recapture a past that is gone. He's basically wrecking his entire countries economy, his country's people, and creating a mess of everything to recapture a time when Russia was great. I wonder if he realizes he's probably going to end up destroying Russia in the end, or if the idea has just lapsed so much over the reality that he doesn't care anymore.

Sounds familiar.

 

[Lego Boss]

It's a great article, honestly, and I think it gives a rare insight in Putin and why he's doing what he's doing: trying to recapture a past that is gone. He's basically wrecking his entire countries economy, his country's people, and creating a mess of everything to recapture a time when Russia was great. I wonder if he realizes he's probably going to end up destroying Russia in the end, or if the idea has just lapsed so much over the reality that he doesn't care anymore.

Didn't realise Putin was president of the USA . . .

Oh, hang on a minute . . .