A surprising consequence of this trend is that while annoying, it had definitely led me to appreciate my home country more (even if I don't support the current government). Probably a predictable manifestation of in-group/out-group dynamics.
As an aside, when I mentioned Putin, she called herself, mockingly, a daughter of Putin. Then she said, we had no playgrounds before he was in power, now we have playgrounds. It was a flippant remark, but a telling one all the same. The west neglected the Russians when the Soviet Union broke up. Bush/Regan celebrated a Cold War victory, which was a mistake. They should have embraced Russia and recognised the potential of the Russian people. I think the Russians have never got over being treated like this, which, obviously, has echos of the Germans in the 30s.
Sorry if I went on here, I think it’s an important subject.
The Five Eyes countries, Germany, Poland, and Japan have overwhelmingly negative views (easy to explain for historical reasons).
But you see overwhelmingly positive views of Russia in China, India, Nigeria, Mexico and Indonesia; and ambivalent views elsewhere in Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean.
“It found that Russia was the least popular G-8 country globally. ... Overall, the percentage of respondents with a positive view of Russia was only 31%.“
That supports the wider point quite well. Though Russia has very positive relations with a small number of countries. For example providing China with massive aid in living memory.
What's up with that?
I don't think that's true, or at least well-defined?
Edit: downvoting because it doesn't fit your world view? At least have the balls to reply.
Also, as to CCTV, it is extremely prevalent in London but not as omniscient in places like Salisbury.
Security services sit on information like this for years, possibly never to reach daylight i.e. it's at best 50/50 whether MI5's director(Hollis) in the 50s and 60s was a double agent for the GRU, but we will never know what is in the archives. It is undeniable, however, that the Russian's did it - a Russian nerve agent just happens to turn up in the middle of Salisbury!?
During Hollis's tenure, the KGB and GRU were just one step ahead every single move they made, to the point that they broke up a spy ring and the KGB didn't even phone home to Moscow that day. Other examples include bugged rooms suddenly being vacated or bugs in walls being filled with needle-like precision. They gradually worked up the tree until they realized there had to be a mole very high up in MI5 (or not at all, but it's not as neat).
British intelligence had been completely rocked by the Cambridge Five - communists had infiltrated pretty much everywhere in British intelligence until people like Peter Wright modernized the service largely by running around chasing leads from 40 years ago (in the 1970s) from people like Anthony Blunt who had given up fighting. The British establishment had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards the notion that an Englishman could be a communist despite his upbringing and public school training.
Can you imagine the fuss then, when it turns out that Hollis - who is already a very conservative (unambitious, won't step on toes etc.) leader of the service - is suspected of treachery? He had spent years in China in his youth, possibly having contact with known Russian assets. If he was really a spy, the smoking gun is that it turned out that when he was sent to interview Igor Gouzenko (A defector now residing in Canada), he apparently showed almost no interest in what Gouzenko had to say and was wearing a disguise. This may sound relatively innocuous but remember that a defector could quite possibly recognize you on from photographs of their agents.
The main case against this hypothesis relies on a few fairly not overly strong but nonetheless useful points: Oleg Gordievsky (Briefly Deputy Head of the KGB in London) clearly stated that his station chief stated that this rumour around Hollis must've been some British trick. This is potentially very strong evidence, however, it is the word of one man. Gordievsky is reliable, however, but more importantly he was KGB and Hollis was always supposed to be GRU (and he was definitely inactive long before Gordievsky would've been able to speak English let alone stationed in London). ELLI is a currently unknown cryptonym (alleged to be Hollis), it may apparently be Leo Long but that doesn't add up with the leaks from MI5.
MI5 (via Andrew) and MI6 (via Macintyre's book) - both had official archive access, extremely rare for MI6 - both claim its smoke without fire, Misguided conspiracy. It could well be, but this glosses over that there was a (according to Wright at least) an investigation that lasted the best part of a decade neither indicted nor exonerated him (https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104603) but on balance said it was more likely that not that he was not a spy. However, the proceedings of said investigation are not public as far as I can and the investigation-investigation thatcher speaks of in the speech linked to was run by a friend of Hollis. Chapman Pincher seems to allege that Hollis's family spoke openly of his work for the USSR but Pincher is now dead, and I don't really believe him at face value.
https://www.iwp.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/20150417_Repo... This document lays out pretty much everything known about Hollis, along with some (IIRC) elsewhere uncommon information linking Hollis's movements with that of the spy SONIA.
The real story here isn't really whether Hollis was a spy or not (he was incompetent as far as I can see), but that the Russian's are unbelievably good at espionage (but not unbeatable - see Operation PIMLICO).
Source?
After reading, "Novichok agents: a historical, current, and toxicological perspective"[1] it looks like the only places to have produced such agents are Russian chemical weapon labs and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Central Analytical Database.
Maybe someone who works in the field can provide some more evidence either way?
[1]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6039123/#R19
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/rcm.7757
https://analyticalscience.wiley.com/do/10.1002/sepspec.1591c...
I am pretty sure that the Porton Down military research facility next to Salisbury is capable or producing it too - but that doesn't mean they produced the specific poison used to attack the Skipals.
The same for VX gas that was used to kill Kim Jong Un's brother in Malaysia. VX was indeed invented by the brits but I would seriously doubt that they killed Kim Jong-Nam.
Edit: this is just factual information. What kind of fscking loosers do downvote this? Go get a reality check.
Of course, you could argue that British intelligence framed those Russians during the investigation, and poisoned the Skripals themselves as some sort of ruse for expelling diplomats. But if you deny the evidence and proceed down that path, you've made the decision not to alter your beliefs and no discussion will change your mind.
They are revealed here pretty well: https://web.archive.org/web/20180927051828/http://news.met.p...
Tl;dr American army did carnage, the (one of most popular) game portraits that Russians did that
Or entire company of heroes 2 controversy
This is pure propaganda
It has some great images, especially in the final part.
"...the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor..." [1]
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/james-clapper...
Weird, right? /s
If Saudi Arabia were to commit a comparable offense, I assure you they'd face a comparable response, or worse (remember what happened to Saddam Hussein).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabian-led_intervention...
Go read that wikipedia article you posted. It links to a good explanation of the Iran-Arab proxy conflict.
Or at least, the facts can line up with this interpretation.
> Crimea is also part of an ongoing proxy conflict between NATO and Russia, where NATO seeks to encircle the latter.
Fuck, this again? Go ahead and connect the dots for me. Explain what specific actions on the part of NATO, or the countries that have requested membership in NATO, were responsible for Russia suddenly invading a neighbor country that posed no threat to it, forcibly annexing a large part of it, and maintaining a ruinous and deadly guerilla conflict in much of the rest.
What specific actions of NATO lead you to think that its ambitions for Russia in the 2010s differ from its ambitions for the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s?
What has changed since the Cold War, in those ambitions? What specific actions has NATO taken that make it clear that those ambitions have changed? What reassurance is Russia expected to see that encirclement, containment, and isolation is not the goal of the West? I can't see a single bloody one.
We're going down the exact same road again, the only difference is that the front line is now 300 miles further east. Which is very comforting for Czechs, and Hungarians but unfortunately, far less so for Ukranians.
(Oh, and to answer your question, I think 'US Army bases in Poland' is a pretty good, solid example of why Russia feels threatened. Had the War in Donbas not happened, as likely as not, we'd have been seeing US Army bases in Crimea today. It's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, though. I advise that the best way to win for the buffer states is to either adopt neutrality, or, barring that, to not antagonize the side that's being backed into a corner.)
Honestly, I'm not interested in engaging with this prove-a-negative nonsense. In my humble opinion, invading a neighbor and annexing part of it can't be justified short of a clear, present, and profound security risk. NATO, a voluntary, chronically underfunded defensive organization almost completely subservient to the political gyrations of the US, the leader of which is now actively trying to destroy it, is not that risk, and I don't believe that anybody honestly thinks it is.
Putin will gladly use any action on the part of European countries to justify more invasions. Like the way Sergey Lavrov threatened "military technical measures" in the Baltic region if Sweden joined NATO. Remember that? The Baltic states are lined up like dominos, possibly Belarus as well, where I've heard rumors that Russia is already sending troops. As Trump says when he has no clue what he's talking about, "We'll see what happens".
I believe NATO has the capability to bomb Moscow from Latvia in minutes.
I don't think Russia rates its vulnerability by border ratio vs total NATO aligned country border ratio. They look at how fast NATO could wreck Moscow.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-sponsored_terrorism#Saud...
> If Saudi Arabia were to commit a comparable offense, I assure you they'd face a comparable response
Offenses were cited to you. Where is the "commensurate response by the international community" to these offenses?
I think SA gets too little sanctions for what they do. Too little.
And by the way, I'm totally in favour of Russia sanctions. I'm not questioning any of that.
During reclaim there were not any resistance from the local population. It says a lot.
And you're wrong about resistance as well.
I had a shock beyond believe seeing Bush pretty much saying "let Saudis go!," and jumping out of his skin trying to shield them, and then starting a war on Saddam — SA's biggest enemy at the time.
But lets keep the conversation on topic.
Saudi Arabia's economy is non-existent and hyper-unproductive, and its military is farcical. While it has some modern hardware, it has F-15s being staffed by profoundly incompetent princlings (just another example of the broken nature of the society, where it is the absolute inverse of a meritocracy. Incompetence and nepotism from top to bottom).
Saudi Arabia is irrelevant, unless maybe you're some Indian guy looking for a job where you live in servitude as a slave in some foreign nation. When they do deplorable things it just doesn't get a lot of notice because it's entirely expected. They got to prance around with an imagined importance when they could squeeze the oil spigot, but now...eh. Those days are long gone.
That commander had no business being in charge of a lemonade stand, much less a military vessel, and I'm told such nepotism is rampant in the Saudi military. People who have been isolated from all consequences of their actions for their whole lives tend to make terrible leaders.
O_O you are so wrong, it is one the biggest foreign lobbying power in America, and Europe.
But this is not the point of this conversation.
Even then, despite being so Remain-y I moved to Berlin, I don’t see how Russia made enough of a difference to count as successfully interfering compared to all the decisions taken by Cameron up to the day of the referendum itself.
As in, Russia is no longer a trustworthy seeming, interesting, attractive place to want to go visit or collaborate with or be associated with.
I mean, of course it depends on the level of detail you're dealing with and who exactly you're associating with. But for me, a general observer, Russia certainly seems to have gotten a history of doing and being the source of shady things.
Even aside from that, and this is probably skewed by the history books focusing on the oddest parts of history -- Russia always reads like an odd, outlier place in history. Or maybe it's the Russian literature. Always something strange, or depressing going on there.
What's up with that?