[Sixstrings]

So , sixstring , do you dig things a bit sometimes
or if you believe things written in "USA today" stick to the sport section

I know about Georgia.

South Ossetia has ethnic Russians. They broke away from Georgia. No other nation recognizes South Ossetia as a separate country, other than Russia.

If I recall, I'm pretty sure I read things about Russia purposely moving Russians in to these border regions. It's the same old game we did with Mexico and Texas in the 1800s. Get your people in there first, then they can rebel and demand annexation by the mother country.

How is this whole ethnic Russian thing in little strips of land in other countries, any different then when Hitler went on and on about ethnic Germans threatened in the Rhineland and Sudetenland?

Ossetians say Georgians did something to them first, and Georgians said Ossetians did something first and that's why they went in. And then the whole Russian Army comes swooping down into Georgia. You don't think that was overkill? As "peacekeepers?"

Russia just recently extended this border another 14 miles, for "olympic security." So what ethnic Russians were being threatened in this new 14 mile patch of land? Will Russia ever give that back? Should the US extend our border into Canada, just for the hell of it? We could probably come up with a reason too, "security" or cite ethnic Americans living in Alberta and we've got to protect the Americans up there from the Canadians.

Also, far as I know there was never a UN security council resolution authorizing Russia to unilaterally roll into Georgia proper and start shooting up apartment buildings deep in Georgia.

I don't know all the details and intricacies of the Georgia thing, but I'll tell you this much -- if Russia rolls in again, the US ought to be a lot tougher about it next time around. I think that last time we finally sent some navy ships into a Georgian port to give the Russians a hint. We could have been a lot more aggressive than that; for the most part our gov was very quiet about it, while Russian tanks were rolling all over Georgia and shooting the place up.

[Sixstrings]

From wiki:

After 3 years from August War, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev admitted NATO would have been expanded to admit ex-Soviet republics if Russia had not invaded Georgia in 2008 to defend a rebel region. "If you...had faltered back in 2008, the geopolitical situation would be different now," Medvedev said in a speech to soldiers at a base in Vladikavkaz.[330][331] In August 2012, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia had drawn up a plan to counter a Georgian attack long before the August 2008 conflict in the Caucasus. He said the plan was developed by the Russian General Staff in late 2006-early 2007 and it was negotiated with Putin, who was serving his second presidential term in that period. According to Putin, they "trained South Ossetian militia under this plan."

U.S. president George W. Bush's statement to Russia was: "Bullying and intimidation are not acceptable ways to conduct foreign policy in the 21st century."[344] "Russia has invaded a sovereign neighbouring state and threatens a democratic government elected by its people," said Mr Bush. "Such an action is unacceptable in the 21st century." [345] The US Embassy in Georgia, describing the Matthew Bryza press-conference, called the war an "incursion by one of the world's strongest powers to destroy the democratically elected government of a smaller neighbor".[346]
Initially the Bush Administration considered a military response to defend Georgia, but such an intervention was ruled out due to the inevitable conflict it would lead to with Russia.[347][348] Instead, Bush opted for a softer option by sending humanitarian supplies to Georgia by military, rather than civilian, aircraft.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_war#Humanitarian_impact_and_war_crimes

That's interesting, I never knew we were that close to sending forces to Georgia to face off with Russia.

Sending humanitarian ships was the right call -- a soft hint to Russia to cool it down, and go back over to their side of the border.

Some more on that, from wiki's source:

Bush Aides Weighed Attack to Halt Russia-Georgia War

George W. Bush’s national security team considered launching air strikes to halt the invasion. Vladimir Putin boasted that he alone could be trusted. And Nicolas Sarkozy badgered Georgia’s leader into signing a cease-fire.

Written with a diplomat’s feel for policy nuance and a journalist’s eye for detail, the book traces how Russia exploited U.S.-European divisions -- magnified by the festering sore of the Iraq war -- to put a stop to Georgia’s headstrong embrace of the West.

Thus we learn that “several senior White House staffers” urged “at least some consideration of limited military options,” such as bombing the mountain tunnel that served as Russia’s main supply line.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=anp.wBWKJBGY

[Strummer]

An EU investigation came to a very clear conclusion that the war was started by Georgia, not Russia, and that view is also shared by many of NATO officials:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibi ... eorgia_war

full report here:

http://www.ceiig.ch/

The whole thing was orchestrated by the US anyway, just like the various "revolutions" in the Ukraine before, and similar efforts in other countries bordering on Russia. In the current geopolitical and economic situation, the US benefits from instability, around Russia, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

[Sixstrings]

An EU investigation came to a very clear conclusion that the war was started by Georgia, not Russia, and that view is also shared by many of NATO officials:

It also came to the conclusion that Russia went too far in invading Georgia proper:

It also concluded that Russia would had the right to intervene in case of an attack on the Russian peacekeepers, but that the further Russian advance into the "Georgia proper" had been disproportionate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_for_the_Russia%E2%80%93Georgia_war

I understand why Russia had to do what it had to do.

Likewise, when Syria crossed the red line with nerve gas then O should have fired off those missiles and THEN sit down to talk. Russians show strength and deep strategy when they act, while we show weakness and wobbling and cluelessness lately -- and Putin comes in to take advantage every time we show doubt and weakness.

The whole thing was orchestrated by the US anyway, just like the various "revolutions" in the Ukraine before, and similar efforts in other countries bordering on Russia. In the current geopolitical and economic situation, the US benefits from instability, around Russia, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

But Putin meddles too with his neighbors, A LOT, and with covert actions and some hard core KGB things and all kinds of stuff that we don't do.

Both sides are in cold war-ish proxy struggles. Sure, the West could back off and recognize some Russian influence zone over a swath of the continent but what happens once Russia has complete influence over those areas. Would a Russian government stop there or keep pushing?

This is just a fact of history and it's what opposing world powers do, they push against each other, continuously. The only way to stop it is if we remain the strongest, or, if Russia joins the club.

Also globalism and enmeshed central banking, US dollar as worldwide reserve currency, and trade keep world peace. If Putin wants to pull Russia ever farther out of that, then how can that not be a concern for the West? War becomes possible if we're no longer tied together, whether it's Russia or China we're talking about.

[Sixstrings]

Gee, whaddya know, I was right about Syria:

U.S. Scolds Russia as It Weighs Options on Syrian War

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Secretary of State John Kerry on Monday sharpened the Obama administration’s mounting criticism of Russia’s role in the escalating violence in Syria, asserting that the Kremlin was undermining the prospects of a negotiated solution by “contributing so many more weapons” and political support to President Bashar al-Assad.

“They’re, in fact, enabling Assad to double down, which is creating an enormous problem,” Mr. Kerry said in Jakarta, Indonesia, before he flew here to confer with top officials of the United Arab Emirates, a gulf state that has been a strong supporter of the Syrian opposition.

Mr. Kerry’s tough criticism underscored the erosion of the Russian-American partnership in Syria, and raised questions about the viability of the United States’ diplomatic strategy to help resolve the escalating crisis.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/world/middleeast/russia-is-scolded-as-us-weighs-syria-options.html?hpw&rref=world&_r=0

Putin would be wise to be careful with his chess. Don't make Obama look too bad after cooperating and following Putin's lead. <-- all that will do is make Russia a big campaign issue in 2016. It could be the one thing that could elect a Republican. And that's not good for Russia, there really is a difference between a John McCain and a John Kerry.

If Russia wants to make some big plays in the world, it should want a soft and cuddly Democrat in the oval office and not a cold war neocon, which is exactly what will happen if Putin isn't careful and goes too far. You've already got 60% of American viewing Russia as "unfriendly / enemy." You've already got the far left pissed off about all the human rights stories out of Russia. What does that gain for Russia? Pissing western liberals off too??? Unless he wants a cold war.

But what I'm saying here is, just some free strategy for Russia, if they did want to make some plays in the world then be cool about it. Be smart. Keep the West neutralized -- give them gay rights, don't shoot at Greenpeace, work with the West on Syria, do these things that cost Russia nothing and then you could take Ukraine.

[sparky]

.
@ At Sixstrings
the Russians peacekeepers were there under the 1992 Sochi agreement
their force was limited to 500 with individual weapons
their mission was to keep the Georgians and Ossetians from ripping each others , which they did
there were quite a lot of Georgians left behind the separation line
the Russians troops made sure they were not harassed ( too much )

in April 1995 the European OSCE send ten military observers to check on things

they confirmed that in 2008 the Georgians did attack the city of Tskhinvali with an artillery bombardment of some duration
followed by an assault with ground troops , the Russians peacekeepers were particularly targeted

Putin doesn't want to go for world domination , he just want what he see as his country rights
his father fought a hero's war , his mother survived the great siege of Leningrad as a skeleton
his older brother died during the siege
growing up in a rough neighborood , he was refused in the pionniers movement
a communist youth front virtually everybody was in it
he was saved from becoming a street thug by his old Judo teacher
who made a man out of him and got him ,on merit to joint the Leningrad team ,
didn't made it to the national team because of his attitude

the then new chief of the KGB was Andropov ,
while very scary to look at , he was rather smarter than the rest ,
during the 1956 Hungarian revolution he wanted to let it go and talk things over
the military overrode him ,
As the new KGB chief he got rid of old alcoholics and took new promising youngsters
being non conformist was seen as good , Gorbachev was one of his protegee
At a much lower level Putin was taken in , he became a low grade major ,
send to Dresden to spy on the Soviet troops in garrison there and their foreign contacts
he didn't spy on the East Germans that was the Stasi job

he returned to nothing much in Leningrad ,
doing some odd taxi jobs with his service car , watching the rotten oligarchs pillaging the place
while war veterans sold their medals to eat
he was given a job by an old friend with the very liberal mayor of Leningrad Anatoly Sobchack
his job was as a fixer to get some food into the city , dealing with a wide range of people
some criminals were reliable some businessmen were rip off artistes
even his longest enemies said he was clean

eventually he was called to Moscow were he performed in an efficient manner
eventually becoming the FSB boss , then in the 1 of January 2000 acting president

he called all the big oligarchs and gave them the new rules
pay your taxes and don't try to control the politics
in exchange they could keep what they had stolen , no questions asked
a few big ones tried to be smart , he drove them to the ground


After the Snowden business , Obama snubbed him , refusing to visit him
the same day his old trainer and mentor died
Putin was shattered

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKNmHFoAjMo

If Putin was the American president , there would be much less problems and more respect

[Sixstrings]

If Putin was the American president , there would be much less problems and more respect

That was a really nice post (seriuosly, not being sarcastic, and I like to learn new things on the topic). You have some nice writing talent there -- Putin's life would make a good novel.

I have to say though, the way you write about him, it sounds a bit like the hero mythology thing North Korea does with the Dear Leader. It almost sounds like a movie, right on down to having some asian kung fu mysticism with a judo master.

Sparky, this is propaganda. He's just a man and a politician same as any other. If you swallow the leadership cult hero worship thing, then that's deifying your leader, and it then becomes impossible for anyone to criticize him because it's like criticizing Jesus or Mohammed to a religious person.

Same thing, hero worship leadership cult backstory, was done about Hugo Chavez.

We had a bit of that going on in O's campaign. And yes, we all drank the koolaid (including me) and got a little silly with the hopeychangey "wise black man will lead us to the promisedland" stuff. Like he was gonna be a Martin Luther King or something.

IT WAS PROPAGANDA. And it was seized upon and used, on purpose, by O's campaign. But then after election, they did the right thing and cooled off on all that. That's not who we are as Americans. We aren't fascists. We don't do leadership cults and deify our president. Obama actually didn't like it either and he started toning down his speeches, the whole "obama obama" chanting thing, it creeped him out too.

O is a good man and he put the brakes on all that stuff -- no real American would want to be worshipped. Only tyrants and dictators and kings want that, because it's useful to them to be deified and squelch dissent.

Back to Putin. Here's my impressions, from my vantage point:

In all the news clips of him meeting with Bush, Putin just looked *scary* to me. Medvedev never looked scary. But Putin did.

Putin even did some jedi mind trick on Bush, and Bush was saying crazy things like "I looked into his soul through his eyes" or some sh*t. Wtf?

So okay, Russia has a new sheriff in town and it's a tough guy again, ok cool we Americans are used to that and played ball like that for a while like it's the Cold War again. Bush and Putin seemed to do okay with each other.

Then with Obama.. everything went off the rails. Putin began being purposely insulting. He actually LOOKED like a Fidel Castro or something, in all of his body language. Fundamentally opposed to the United States. Slouching in chairs. Making John Kerry wait for four hours on purpose. Just constant insults like that.

I started reading about Putin..

after I came across some stories about murdered journalists in one of the lefty magazines like Slate or one of those. That was like "whoah, holy sh*t," and it perked my interest. And after that I'd read more whenever I run across these stories out of Russia.

The fact is, there was a period during Putin's rise where a lot of journalists were getting murdered. I don't know if he has any direct link to that or how close he or his people are to that, but it is what it is.

I've been watching House of Cards season 2 on netflix lately. It occurred to me that while House of Cards is fiction, Russian and Ukrainian and Belorussian politics are the real deal. Things that happen in House of Cards, have gone on for real in Russian politics.

I give Putin a pass now, on all the stuff that happened in his rise to power, because I'm objective and the really bad things have appeared to stop for a number of years now. So fair enough. That's all anyone asks, we understand Russia is a rough place in turbulent times. As horrible as the stories of the murdered journalists are, and some other things that went on too in those years, the world can forget them if those things have stopped.

So, then, after all these posts and back and forths with radon and dissident and yourself, and then reading more in the course of posting on this forum, I began to get a more nuanced understanding.

And I agree with you now that while he may be out to advance Russian power at US expense wherever he can, Putin isn't out to "dominate the world" and I don't think he's another Hitler. He rarely speaks English, but in the clips I've seen he's surprisingly soft-spoken in English and not scary at all. But with those cold KGB eyes, speaking Russian, he's just *scary.*

Sparky, do you remember the dissident who got radiation poisoned in London? Someone sprinkled polonium all over a damn sushi restaurant. Do you remember that? Jesus H. Christ if that had happened in the US I'd be ready to vote for war, buddy. Toe to toe DEFCON V, nobody had better ever do that sh*t over here in the US.

In the recent Stephen Colbert interview with Pussy Riot, Colbert made a joke while introducing them. He said to the audience "I won't be sharing their sushi." He was referencing what happened in London. So apparently Colbert thinks Putin / Russian intel was behind that. All of this stuff is in the zeitgeist over here about Russia. It's some really phenomenally bad PR.

I agree that Putin is a strong leader for Russia, and that he's not all bad, and really he's just a strategist -- he will use the Church but isn't really a religious nut (he's an atheist). He'll enable anti-gay hate laws if that's useful to him, while personally he probably doesn't care.

From a rational, strategic standpoint..

Assuming Russia DID want to go fascist and expansionist -- it's not even ready for that yet. It can't afford cold war. Its GDP is the same as Brazil. Gazprom needs European customers as much as they need the gas.

So all these things Putin does, I guess it's just grandmaster chess and sabre-rattling and posturing, but not a real threat. But WE HAVE TO KEEP UP WITH HIM and compete with him, toe to toe. We don't have a choice. He really could do something to really screw us over, in some 30-deep move chess maneuver and us making a deal with him on Syria and Iran then him turning around selling weapons and whatever winds up blowbacking on us big time.

We gotta be careful with Putin. And I wish Russians all the best and if y'all want to love him then more power to you but if he picks a fight with the US then I will vote for strong leadership too.

(P.S. if Putin would make some positive changes then I'm a fair minded person and I'd stfu about the past. I sincerely hope that's what he does, and it would be good for Russia's future post-putin and good for how history will view him. It could be argued that Russia needed a Putin, but things aren't turbulent anymore, now is the time to steer Russia on a good track for the future with democratic institutions, constitutional rights, and restrained rule-of-law government, that are bigger than any one man.)

[sparky]

.
I have no illusion about Putin , just right now he has this eternal Russian problem
he know he is good but is not sure there is anybody else after him so he doesn't let go
ultimately a country has to change gears , good or bad
Putin is very popular but beside him there is nobody ( nobody being Medvedev , the man is a looser )

the alternative are the Nationalist of Jirinovsky , a dangerous lunatic
or the communists of Zyuganov who want to go back to the good o'l days

on the fringe there is the National Bolsheviks of Limonov , a pretty fascinating character
writer ,dissident , majordomo in New York , famous for firing with a machine gun on besieged Sarajevo
his boys keep raising hell and being thumped by the cops ( Russian cops hate neo-nazis )

As you can see it's a pretty F...cked set up ,
typical of Russia , the land where intelligent people would rather be drunk than in the government

[Sixstrings]

The only evidence I see in these articles of anything criminally actionable was the one guy who threw a "lemon" which didn't hurt any police.

Otherwise, this is just 6-8 years in prison for the People breaking the law against assembly.

Riot police officers detain a protester outside Zamoskvoretsky district court in Moscow.


Dozens of officers were present to keep protesters back, and many more waiting in vehicles

Tension was high before the hearing, as police guarding the courthouse pulled several protesters out of the crowd that gathered to support the defendants and bundled them into buses. Demonstrators shouted: "Shame!"

The mother of one of the defendants said she feared that the violence in Ukraine – in which at least 75 people have died in 48 hours of clashes between police and protesters – increased the chance of a harsh verdict, as Russian authorities set out to show how they dealt with unrest. Putin says he does not use the courts as a political tool.

Some wore white ribbons – a symbol of the wave of opposition protests that erupted in December 2011 – and pins reading: "Glory to the heroes of May 6."

But Kremlin critics and relatives did not expect the defendants in the Bolotnaya case to walk free on Friday. "Almost no one doubts that the verdict will be vindictive and cruel," said Khodorkovsky on Thursday.

Stella Anton, whose 21-year-old son, Denis Lutskevich, was dragged bleeding and shirtless from the protest site, said: "This trial is a reprisal and an attempt to frighten people." Lutskevich denies hitting police and said officers beat him up.

"It seems to me that because of the events in Ukraine, we cannot expect anything good," she said.

Nobody was killed at the 2012 protest and the defendants are not charged with endangering the lives or health of police. One is accused of hitting an officer with an "unidentified hard, yellow object" that his lawyers say was a lemon. Putin has said anyone found guilty of attacking police must be punished.

"Unfortunately, I think they'll get real jail sentences," said Boris Nemtsov, an opposition leader. "This trial is absolutely political, the judge is carrying out the Kremlin's instructions."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/21/anti-kremlin-putin-protesters-guilty-verdict-court

Eight anti-Putin protesters guilty as 200 supporters detained outside court

A Russian judge has found a group of anti-Putin protesters guilty for rioting and violence against police.

By law, they could be jailed for eight years. Prosecuters are calling for sentences of five to six years.

The group, mostly in their 20s, were arrested during clashes at an opposition rally in Moscow last year the day before President Vladimir Putin was sworn in for a third Kremlin term.

The group pleaded not guilty in the trial denounced by Kremlin critics as politically motivated.

Hundreds of people gathered to support the defendants, shouting “freedom!”

Two women from protest group Pussy Riot were in the crowd.

Some wore white ribbons – a symbol of protest and discontent.

A police spokesman said around 200 people outside the court were arrested for public order offences after the guilty verdicts were announced.

By law, most large outdoor gatherings require prior approval from government officials, according to Russian authorities.
http://www.euronews.com/2014/02/21/anti-putin-protesters-face-jail-for-assault-on-police/