Ukraine Megathread: Crimea River Build a Bridge, Get Over It

[Jinwoy]

Too bad the US is the only real country capable of projection of force, right?

[Korva]

Too bad the US is the only real country capable of projection of force, right?

Anglo-Saxon Hegemony means that Britain need not rely on its own means of projection.

Apparently, Lord and Savoir of the Russian People, Comrade Vladimir Putin, has said that it's the West's fault that Ukraine is in such a mess and is totally no way at all his fault and no blame whatsoever should be put on him or the glorious Russian soldiers that accidentally annexed Crimea.

Obviously someone is getting a bit senile in his old age.

You forgot how he referred to the U.S. as the "so called winners of the Cold War".

Things are getting pretty Orwellian when your ex-KGB leader is rewriting history in his diatribes against the West.

Maybe they can have their own stab-in-the-back myth.

[Shofercia]

Apparently, Lord and Savoir of the Russian People, Comrade Vladimir Putin, has said that it's the West's fault that Ukraine is in such a mess and is totally no way at all his fault and no blame whatsoever should be put on him or the glorious Russian soldiers that accidentally annexed Crimea.

Obviously someone is getting a bit senile in his old age.

On the contrary. Reading between the lines in that speech, he made it clear that the future will be led by either US or China, and Russia will be backing China. With China's PPP RGDP beating out America's, and with China having energy supplies to meet their insatiable demand for the first time, well shit, it's not that hard to see what's going to happen on the economic front. When your original policy is to place Russia between US and China, and you're switching that by going to China's corner, you need to flame the US. His speech was focused mostly on the US, not the EU, or the West.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-ov ... my-2014-10

Sorry, America. China just overtook the US to become the world's largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. Chris Giles at the Financial Times flagged up the change. He also alerted us in April that it was all about to happen. Basically, the method used by the IMF adjusts for purchasing power parity, explained here.

The simple logic is that prices aren't the same in each country: A shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than in San Francisco, so it's not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist's Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.

So the IMF measures both GDP in market-exchange terms and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing-power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world's biggest economy. We've just gone past that crossover on the chart below, according to the IMF. By the end of 2014, China will make up 16.48% of the world's purchasing-power adjusted GDP (or $17.632 trillion), and the US will make up just 16.28% (or $17.416 trillion)

[Oaledonia]

Apparently, Lord and Savoir of the Russian People, Comrade Vladimir Putin, has said that it's the West's fault that Ukraine is in such a mess and is totally no way at all his fault and no blame whatsoever should be put on him or the glorious Russian soldiers that accidentally annexed Crimea.

Obviously someone is getting a bit senile in his old age.

On the contrary. Reading between the lines in that speech, he made it clear that the future will be led by either US or China, and Russia will be backing China. With China's PPP RGDP beating out America's, and with China having energy supplies to meet their insatiable demand for the first time, well shit, it's not that hard to see what's going to happen on the economic front. When your original policy is to place Russia between US and China, and you're switching that by going to China's corner, you need to flame the US. His speech was focused mostly on the US, not the EU, or the West.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-ov ... my-2014-10

Sorry, America. China just overtook the US to become the world's largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. Chris Giles at the Financial Times flagged up the change. He also alerted us in April that it was all about to happen. Basically, the method used by the IMF adjusts for purchasing power parity, explained here.

The simple logic is that prices aren't the same in each country: A shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than in San Francisco, so it's not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist's Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.

So the IMF measures both GDP in market-exchange terms and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing-power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world's biggest economy. We've just gone past that crossover on the chart below, according to the IMF. By the end of 2014, China will make up 16.48% of the world's purchasing-power adjusted GDP (or $17.632 trillion), and the US will make up just 16.28% (or $17.416 trillion)

Too bad China also wont work with Russia as they wish. The only thing that China and Russia seem to agree upon is a vague mistrust in America.

[Buse]

By providing facts to counter his bullshit. Facts have a tendency to triumph over bullshit.

Well you got it wrong than, as when the Russians were spreading toward East they were regulalry attacked by nomadic people and had to act paranoid and at the end become themself like the Chuvahs and others.

Russian ethnicity = Russes + Slavs, who provided numerous births in Novgorod in 862 AD. This is a historically accepted fact, with primary sources provided in Karamzin's account, created in the early 1800s. Way before Communism, Russia vs West, and all that stuff. As for Csar Ivan the Terrible, he was a decent Csar until some idiot boyars killed his wife, which drove him insane. Csar Nicolas the II was incompetent and reactionary and doesn't represent all of Russian Csars. Claiming so is as foolish as claiming that Dubya represents all American presidents and that Washington was as bad as Dubya.

OK let us say if we teleport a Novgorodian from the past and ask him what is his nationality. you think he will answer that he is a Russian?

If so than source it. They might be ancestors of modern day Russians but certainly they are not Russians themselfs, as is the case between Illyirians and Albanians.

Uhh, yeah he was. Peter the Great is an ethnic Russian. That's a fact. Look up his genealogy.

Without his advisors who were Europeans it is wondering that he even made a trip to EUrope in order to civilise Russia. Catherine II was not Russian.

A government against which the Russian repeatedly revolted? That's not a legitimate government. And yeah, they invaded. You also omit Hitler's Genocidal Invasion. Even so, all of that was gone by the Khrushchev Era, so no, he's wrong again.

The Russians have elected Kerenskys government on elections which Lenin lost. So the majority of Russians agree with his policies and thus did not revolted against them.

Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler so it is not important who ruled them.

Kennan was busy writing up propaganda for his idea of containment to be enforced. People like him, as well as his Soviet equivalents, are a part of the reason that the US and USSR didn't stabilize the World when there was a chance. That's hardly something to admire.

We both agree that the Soviet government was neurotic when it came to neighbours, so his ideas were justified gives how the USSR conquered the Baltics and Germany. If the Soviets were not so evil than Kennan would not propose the containment policies.

The West was in other hand not interested in "exporting democracy" in the USSR.

[United Marxist Nations]

Stalin didn't kill more Russians than Hitler:

Historians working after the Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines.[114][115][116] Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million – a total of about 9 million victims of repression.[117]

Holodomor is debated as to whether it was malicious (a lot of evidence says it wasn't)

The fighting involved millions of Axis and Soviet troops along the broadest land front in military history. It was by far the deadliest single theatre of war in World War II, with over 10 million military deaths on the Soviet side (out of which 3.6 million died in German captivity[97]); Axis military deaths were over 5 million (out of which 800,000 died in Soviet captivity).[98] Included in this figure of Axis losses is the majority of the 2 million German military personnel listed as missing or unaccounted for after the war. Rüdiger Overmans states that it seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that one half of these men were killed in action and the other half dead in Soviet custody.[99]

Estimated civilian deaths range from about 14 to 17 million. Over 11.4 million Soviet civilians within pre-1939 borders were killed, and another estimated 3.5 million civilians were killed in the annexed territories.[100] The Nazis exterminated one to two million Soviet Jews (including the annexed territories) as part of the Holocaust.[101] Soviet and Russian historiography often uses the term "irretrievable casualties". According to the Narkomat of Defence order (№ 023, 4 February 1944), the irretrievable casualties include killed, missing, those who died due to war-time or subsequent wounds, maladies and chilblains and those who were captured.

So, around 9-13 million for Stalin, about 21 million for Hitler. And that's not even counting the deaths Hitler planned to cause, but was stopped from causing.

[Estruia]

Stalin didn't kill more Russians than Hitler:

Historians working after the Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines.[114][115][116] Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million – a total of about 9 million victims of repression.[117]

Holodomor is debated as to whether it was malicious (a lot of evidence says it wasn't)

The fighting involved millions of Axis and Soviet troops along the broadest land front in military history. It was by far the deadliest single theatre of war in World War II, with over 10 million military deaths on the Soviet side (out of which 3.6 million died in German captivity[97]); Axis military deaths were over 5 million (out of which 800,000 died in Soviet captivity).[98] Included in this figure of Axis losses is the majority of the 2 million German military personnel listed as missing or unaccounted for after the war. Rüdiger Overmans states that it seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that one half of these men were killed in action and the other half dead in Soviet custody.[99]

Estimated civilian deaths range from about 14 to 17 million. Over 11.4 million Soviet civilians within pre-1939 borders were killed, and another estimated 3.5 million civilians were killed in the annexed territories.[100] The Nazis exterminated one to two million Soviet Jews (including the annexed territories) as part of the Holocaust.[101] Soviet and Russian historiography often uses the term "irretrievable casualties". According to the Narkomat of Defence order (№ 023, 4 February 1944), the irretrievable casualties include killed, missing, those who died due to war-time or subsequent wounds, maladies and chilblains and those who were captured.

So, around 9-13 million for Stalin, about 21 million for Hitler. And that's not even counting the deaths Hitler planned to cause, but was stopped from causing.

You say 9-13 million as if that is somehow more justifiable.

[United Marxist Nations]

Stalin didn't kill more Russians than Hitler:

Historians working after the Soviet Union's dissolution have estimated victim totals ranging from approximately 4 million to nearly 10 million, not including those who died in famines.[114][115][116] Russian writer Vadim Erlikman, for example, makes the following estimates: executions, 1.5 million; gulags, 5 million; deportations, 1.7 million out of 7.5 million deported; and POWs and German civilians, 1 million – a total of about 9 million victims of repression.[117]

Holodomor is debated as to whether it was malicious (a lot of evidence says it wasn't)

The fighting involved millions of Axis and Soviet troops along the broadest land front in military history. It was by far the deadliest single theatre of war in World War II, with over 10 million military deaths on the Soviet side (out of which 3.6 million died in German captivity[97]); Axis military deaths were over 5 million (out of which 800,000 died in Soviet captivity).[98] Included in this figure of Axis losses is the majority of the 2 million German military personnel listed as missing or unaccounted for after the war. Rüdiger Overmans states that it seems entirely plausible, while not provable, that one half of these men were killed in action and the other half dead in Soviet custody.[99]

Estimated civilian deaths range from about 14 to 17 million. Over 11.4 million Soviet civilians within pre-1939 borders were killed, and another estimated 3.5 million civilians were killed in the annexed territories.[100] The Nazis exterminated one to two million Soviet Jews (including the annexed territories) as part of the Holocaust.[101] Soviet and Russian historiography often uses the term "irretrievable casualties". According to the Narkomat of Defence order (№ 023, 4 February 1944), the irretrievable casualties include killed, missing, those who died due to war-time or subsequent wounds, maladies and chilblains and those who were captured.

So, around 9-13 million for Stalin, about 21 million for Hitler. And that's not even counting the deaths Hitler planned to cause, but was stopped from causing.

You say 9-13 million as if that is somehow more justifiable.

No, I say it as if it's the number.

[Estruia]

You say 9-13 million as if that is somehow more justifiable.

No, I say it as if it's the number.

Yet you make no attempt to criticize Stalin for killing 9-13 million Russians.

[Korva]

No, I say it as if it's the number.

Yet you make no attempt to criticize Stalin for killing 9-13 million Russians.

Check his sig

[United Marxist Nations]

No, I say it as if it's the number.

Yet you make no attempt to criticize Stalin for killing 9-13 million Russians.

That's because my post isn't critical, it's a statement of fact.

[Estruia]

Yet you make no attempt to criticize Stalin for killing 9-13 million Russians.

That's because my post isn't critical, it's a statement of fact.

You may want to actually source it if you want to claim it as fact.

[United Marxist Nations]

That's because my post isn't critical, it's a statement of fact.

You may want to actually source it if you want to claim it as fact.

Is the format the copy-paste is in really not enough to know where it came from? Fine, I'll go find them again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Sta ... of_victims
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Fr ... rld_War_II)#Casualties

[Constantinopolis]

The Russians have elected Kerenskys government on elections which Lenin lost.

No, they didn't. The Provisional Government (the one led by Kerensky) was never elected, and it never organized elections - although it kept promising to do so.

The first democratic elections in Russian history were held in late November 1917, after the October Revolution, and they were organized BY Lenin's government. They were the elections for the Russian Constituent Assembly.

In these elections, the Bolsheviks came second, with 23.5% of the vote, after the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which got 41%. The Bolsheviks had the overwhelming support of urban workers and soldiers, but the SRs had the support of the peasantry, which was more numerous.

[Roski]

Apparently, Lord and Savoir of the Russian People, Comrade Vladimir Putin, has said that it's the West's fault that Ukraine is in such a mess and is totally no way at all his fault and no blame whatsoever should be put on him or the glorious Russian soldiers that accidentally annexed Crimea.

Obviously someone is getting a bit senile in his old age.

On the contrary. Reading between the lines in that speech, he made it clear that the future will be led by either US or China, and Russia will be backing China. With China's PPP RGDP beating out America's, and with China having energy supplies to meet their insatiable demand for the first time, well shit, it's not that hard to see what's going to happen on the economic front. When your original policy is to place Russia between US and China, and you're switching that by going to China's corner, you need to flame the US. His speech was focused mostly on the US, not the EU, or the West.

http://www.businessinsider.com/china-ov ... my-2014-10

Sorry, America. China just overtook the US to become the world's largest economy, according to the International Monetary Fund. Chris Giles at the Financial Times flagged up the change. He also alerted us in April that it was all about to happen. Basically, the method used by the IMF adjusts for purchasing power parity, explained here.

The simple logic is that prices aren't the same in each country: A shirt will cost you less in Shanghai than in San Francisco, so it's not entirely reasonable to compare countries without taking this into account. Though a typical person in China earns a lot less than the typical person in the US, simply converting a Chinese salary into dollars underestimates how much purchasing power that individual, and therefore that country, might have. The Economist's Big Mac Index is a great example of these disparities.

So the IMF measures both GDP in market-exchange terms and in terms of purchasing power. On the purchasing-power basis, China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world's biggest economy. We've just gone past that crossover on the chart below, according to the IMF. By the end of 2014, China will make up 16.48% of the world's purchasing-power adjusted GDP (or $17.632 trillion), and the US will make up just 16.28% (or $17.416 trillion)

Sorry, my Russian friend, but you seem to forget that Purchasing Power Parity, in terms of how the government it, means absolutely nothing?

[Geilinor]

The Russians have elected Kerenskys government on elections which Lenin lost.

No, they didn't. The Provisional Government (the one led by Kerensky) was never elected, and it never organized elections - although it kept promising to do so.

The first democratic elections in Russian history were held in late November 1917, after the October Revolution, and they were organized BY Lenin's government. They were the elections for the Russian Constituent Assembly.

In these elections, the Bolsheviks came second, with 23.5% of the vote, after the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which got 41%. The Bolsheviks had the overwhelming support of urban workers and soldiers, but the SRs had the support of the peasantry, which was more numerous.

That's what he meant. The Bolsheviks lost.

[Costa Fierro]

On the contrary.

There's nothing on the contrary Shof. What Putin said is what Putin said, which is that the mess in the Ukraine was nothing to do with Russia and that it was all the Wests fault. It has nothing to do with China or who will be the next superpower.

[Constantinopolis]

No, they didn't. The Provisional Government (the one led by Kerensky) was never elected, and it never organized elections - although it kept promising to do so.

The first democratic elections in Russian history were held in late November 1917, after the October Revolution, and they were organized BY Lenin's government. They were the elections for the Russian Constituent Assembly.

In these elections, the Bolsheviks came second, with 23.5% of the vote, after the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, which got 41%. The Bolsheviks had the overwhelming support of urban workers and soldiers, but the SRs had the support of the peasantry, which was more numerous.

That's what he meant. The Bolsheviks lost.

No, because they were in a coalition with the left-wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party at the time.

Also, the top three parties were all radical socialists. There is no question that the people voted overwhelmingly for radical socialism, regardless of whether they supported the particular Bolshevik flavour of radical socialism.

[Geilinor]

That's what he meant. The Bolsheviks lost.

No, because they were in a coalition with the left-wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party at the time.

How large was the left-wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party?

[United Marxist Nations]

No, because they were in a coalition with the left-wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party at the time.

How large was the left-wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party?

No idea, because Wikipedia is being a dick.

[Constantinopolis]

No, because they were in a coalition with the left-wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party at the time.

How large was the left-wing of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party?

Unfortunately, I don't know. What I know is that there was very serious dissension among the SR party at the time, with the left-wing accusing the right-wing of having stacked electoral lists with their own candidates, thus cheating the left-wing SRs out of the seats they deserved to get in proportion to their support. This argument - the argument that the largest party in the Constituent Assembly had unfairly allocated most of its seats to the right-wing faction within it - was an important reason for the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly three months later.

By the way, we should keep in mind that even the "right-wing" SRs were radical socialists - just not to the same extent as the "left-wing" SRs and the Bolsheviks. The two leading parties in this election were both revolutionary socialist parties, and the third one (the Mensheviks) were socialists as well, although not revolutionary.

The peoples of the Russian Empire (which was still mostly intact at the time) voted for socialism - and not the thing we would call "social democracy" today, but actual radical socialism (the only kind that existed at the time). The Socialist-Revolutionary Party and the Bolsheviks all argued for the confiscation of the property of capitalists and landlords, and for giving it to the people. The main difference between them was that the Bolsheviks advocated industrialization, while the SRs were strongly influenced by Narodnik ideas and advocated a society based on agricultural communes.

[Costa Fierro]

That seems to be an underlying trend with left wing organizations. None of them can really agree on anything.

[Constantinopolis]

That seems to be an underlying trend with left wing organizations. None of them can really agree on anything.

Which is why I approve the Bolshevik approach of acting when opportunities present themselves, with or without agreement from other left-wing organizations.

Too many leftists in the West seem to be under the impression that things would have been better if only they had sat and talked more.

[Greater Istanistan]

Not just for the Left, though. Any organization tends to generate dissent within its own ranks through group policy.

[Costa Fierro]

That seems to be an underlying trend with left wing organizations. None of them can really agree on anything.

Which is why I approve the Bolshevik approach of acting when opportunities present themselves, with or without agreement from other left-wing organizations.

Too many leftists in the West seem to be under the impression that things would have been better if only they had sat and talked more.

Because people are generally adverse to going out and beating/imprisoning/executing people for differing political opinions. It's part of the whole "social democracy" thing.