AI-generated videos promoting Poland’s exit from the European Union have appeared on Polish-language social media, featuring non-existent, attractive young women advocating for “Polexit”.
One TikTok account called “Prawilne Polki” published content showing women dressed in T-shirts bearing Polish flags and patriotic symbols, European analytics collective Res Futura said. The content targeted audiences aged 15 to 25.
The videos featured statements including: “I want Polexit because I want freedom of choice, even if it will be more expensive. I don’t remember Poland before the European Union, but I feel it was more Polish then.”
I thought that there were not only political but also topological reasons for the significance of the gap but I can’t find anything besides that some historic battles happened there.
So the question is why he would be conquering the Baltics. For Russia’s glory seems to be the preferred answer. But strategically it doesn’t make sense to conquer more land for Russia, without, as it seems, any security improvements at all.
There are three security improvements to this:
Firstly, a flat land is difficult to defend. The Russia would want to bring their western borders to seashores and mountain chains. The Russia used to have pretty much those borders until 1917. I’m attaching a map of what would give the Russia the least amount of flatland to defend in case that the EU ever wanted to attack it.
(Of course there’s the wee question of why would we want to attack them, but a Russian mind would want to attack others if it can do so without getting into too much trouble and therefore assumes others are the same)
Secondly, Baltic countries and Finland are simply very close to St. Petersburg and even to Moscow. It would be easy to bombard especially SPb with missiles from Finnish and Estonian territory. Or even Moscow from Latvian territory.
And thirdly,
if there lots of Russian speakers in an area and it still manages to be democratic and prosper, it shows that Russians are capable of living under democracy. Putin has put a big effort into painting an image of Russians not being capable as a nation to live in a democracy. If anyone people in the Russia identify as “Russian” prospers outside the rule of the Czar, that someone is a threat to the Czar.
It doesn’t make sense to start a war that will most likely be lost to have better defence in a war that then will never happen because Russia ceases existing.
Compared to Nato countries that’s not true. Nato is attacking much more which forces Russia to think about security.
True but without Iraq, Libya and others that wouldn’t be important.
We are going to get chat control. Maybe the Russians would fall for it but we are also ruled by an Oligarchy, that must want to dissolve Russia. Unlike the Russians we pretend that it doesn’t exist while we acknowledge that the billionaires determine politics.
Why would it be lost? If they win the war in Ukraine because of western Europe wanting to protect Ukrainian civilians by forcing them to capitulate to the Russia, why would the same not work in the Baltics? And of course, if the Russia doesn’t win in Ukraine, it will not be going to attack Baltics either. The whole conversation about Suwałki gap includes the assumption that the Russia will win the war in Ukraine.
But if it wins in Ukraine, then Russians would be idiots not to attack Baltics and Finland. (And regarding “because Russia ceases existing”, I’m a bit lost. What did you mean with that?)
The original peace plan only gave the almost conquered oblasts to Russia. Of course, if Russia could influence it, minimizing the frontier would be optimal. But if it is to defend against a West that wants to conquer Russia then creating a casus belli by waging a war for it would be stupid.
It’s the West that wants Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard
Here you are again talking about USA wanting the Russia and then somehow skipping from that to Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (and maybe Sweden). Any such attack would happen with their involvement.
The original peace plan in 2022 included Ukraine sending its army home and the Ukrainian leadership resignating.
But yeah: You are linking to a Wikipedia page that tells what we know: USA has always wanted the Russia to fall. But you do that in a context where you say that Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and/or Poland “wants to conquer Russia” without telling anything about why we in these five countries would want to conquer the Russia. Your link gives no answers to that and without answering that question your argument is missing a crucial core part, without which it cannot function.
You say it’s the Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland that want the Russia and that USA is willing to help. You really need to tell why the hell we five would want to conquer the Russia? With or without help from USA.
Ah well. One of us two has lived in the Russia, the other one apparently has not. I am unhappy with the situation of democracy in Europe, but comparing that to the situation in the Russia means that you lack experience of at least one of these two areas. We are inching towards the kind of society they have in the Russia, but being on the way towards their system does not equal having their system yet. We are far from that.
I don’t know. What’s the difference from your point of view?
Our tax money is not funding neonazis, for example.
Both in the Russia and in Ukraine I saw a really big nazi problem. In the Russia it was big, but also in Ukraine almost as big. My first time in Ukraine was in 2015, so merely a year after their nazi problem had peaked in 2014. It was still very visible if you had any understanding of antifascism. It is maddening how indifferent western Europeans have become to fascism’s spread and growth. And here I don’t mean just “people I don’t like” when I say fascists, but people like Utkin who has SS tattoos on his shoulders.
An actor that is the biggest funder of organizations wanting to bring back National Socialism is not at all at the same level with what is wrong in EU. Only one of these are directly opposed to the declaration of human rights.
Similarly, the Russia has been continuing the genocides it was committing during the imperial times and Soviet times. The EU is not doing anything like that. (The Finns’ behaviour towards the Sámi gets closest, but is magnitudes less bad than what the Russia is doing.)
Thanks. I don’t have anything meaningful to say about this. I know the arguments that Russia is financing all, even the Ukrainian Nazis, but there is also German media pushing the AfD and other shady stuff. I can’t yet settle to believe that it is all Russian while privacy rights are reduced and we seem to prepare to go fascism on our own.
What is happening besides Ukraine?
Hm, there were articles in the Finnish newspapers around year 2005 or 2004 when Putin started financing the neo-nazi organizations in the Russia and countries closely coöperating with the Russia, to do his dirty work. I tried going to the library of Pasila in Helsinki, where they have every newspaper published in Finland since 1880’s on microfilm, but their microfilm reader was broken at that point. And the next time I tried again. I’ve also tried sending email to the newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, that wrote those articles back then, asking them to send them to me because they are extremely relevant now, but I never got a reply from them.
I’m far too overwhelmed with stuff in my children’s life at the moment to really have the energy to go dig through those 20-year-old newspapers on the microfilms (even though I’ve always enjoyed going through the rolls at that library!), as I’ve had burnout episodes already as it is, but maybe I still should. (Meh.)
I guess there must have been articles about in other countries as well, but just like it’s difficult to find a Finn who understood the gravity of the articles back than and therefore has any recall of them having ever been written, I haven’t found any central Europeans who would remember what kind of articles were written about it, and by what papers.
Hm, I once wrote a long text about the word “höhlä” in Finnish. Its existence and etymology alone tell a lot about the centuries of trying to get rid of Ukrainians.
But, there are 39 Finno-Ugric languages. You might know of Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian. And then there are 10-ish Sámi languages. But who are the rest? Why do you never hear of them? And only a part of the nations colonized by the Russia are Finno-Ugric. There are the Aleutian, there are the Altaic, there are the Turkic and there are the various Caucasian cultural groups I understand much worse than the four other groups I’ve mentioned. (Except that I’m currently learning Ingushetian and have learned it’s very close to Ichkerian, a.k.a. “Chechnyan”)
And yeah, people don’t often understand the history of place names such as the name of the “Novorossijsk”. That translates literally to “Newrussia-town”. They named it that way because it was founded when those lands were taken from the nation that lived there previously and assimilated under the Russian culture. Those were the “New lands”, or in Russian: “Novorossija”. Go to Youtube and find about the Kubanskaya Balachka. Its speakers vehemently say it’s not Ukrainian, but a form of Russian, but being able to speak both Ukrainian and Russian, I find the case absolutely unambiguous. But indeed: Those families who were able to say with straight face “no, we are absolutely Russians and nothing else!” were the only ones who weren’t disappeared to Siberia. And that’s what they say to this day. But Russians cannot understand that “dialect”, while Ukrainians don’t even recognize it as not being Ukrainian, unless explicitly told they are not listening to Ukrainian but Kubanskaya Balachka.
In the 1920’s and 1930’s USSR formed Ukrainian-language youth choirs in the area of Novorossija in the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, RSFSR. Soon after, all children that had enrolled to those choirs, plus their siblings and parents, were sent to work camps in Siberia. But Ukrainians were not really special in that regard. The Russian Empire, and later USSR, was constantly doing the same stuff to all nations within the territory controlled by it.
But, to answer this:
Just take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Russia . Look at the sheer number of names of nations listed there. Each of those was a full-fledged nation of its own just a bit over 100 years ago. Only the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railway truly expanded the Kremlin influence further than some 500 km from Moscow. Until that, those lands were parts of the Russian empire basically only on paper. Without a connection neither by railway or by sea, there was no sensible way of ruling those lands. The only way to move about was along “roads”, that were rather paths than anything we would contemporarily call “roads”. There was no infrastructure like the Swedish network of gästgiveri establishments, so the only way to get anywhere more than a day’s riding trip from home was to pack your own tent and have some seriously good survival skills. And that’s not something the Czars were doing. Going to some place in eastern Siberia to give orders to the locals would have been an endeavour akin to what Marco Polo did. Until the construction of the Trans-Siberian railway most of those nations were just living their life. Some maybe paid tax to Moscow, most didn’t. And now they are a list of nation names feeling endlessly long, and you have almost never heard of any of them. What did your mother tell you about the Mordvins? Or the Soyot? Or the Sakha? Those tens and tens of nations have fallen into nothingness in our minds, even though in the end of 1800’s they were thriving. Their disappearance is what is happening besides Ukraine. And it’s an ongoing process. In Finland we keep reading news about what is happening to the rights of the Finno-Ugric nations because they are cultures similar to ours, speaking language more or (much) less similar to ours, and following traditions of our old pre-christian religion, but for central Europeans those news are of as much interest as news on some tribes in Nigeria or Ethiopia. For us it means loss of our own roots, because for us those nations are similarly close as the Spanish and Greek, French and Czech are for each other. When you more people in your own family, you understand your own nuclear family much better than you otherwise would. Of course, the Soyot and Sakha not being Finno-Ugric, we don’t really read much anything about them in Finland, either. But it’s easy to check that their plight is very analogous to that of the Finno-Ugric nations, so we also have an understanding of their situation.
I would like you to list the attacks Finland, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Canada have done that have been much more than the attacks against Korea, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Moldova, Ichkeria, Tajikistan, Georgia and Ukraine that the Russia has done. (And yes, I did open your phrase “NATO countries” to list a random selection of NATO countries, because that makes the question easier to answer. Because you said those countries have been attacking others a lot, and I haven’t really noticed them doing so.)
The USA are running Nato. To compare minor countries, that still managed to have colonial cruelties, with the USSR, to show that current Russia is more dangerous, doesn’t feel right.
There was a deal that European countries will allow USA to remain an uncontested military hegemon by making sure to not put resources into armaments. We saved a ton of money, and could use that money for nicer things. At the same time USA’s military hegemony gained it influence that it was able to translate into money. Both sides won. And, as a part of that arrangement, the USA was indeed running NATO.
Now we know that if there will ever be a war where NATO is needed, USA will not come for help. NATO is no longer the USA project it once was. Since we know that USA won’t help, we will not do a shit to help if they want to go for another war against Afghanistan or Iraq or do other similar horrors.
You say that comparing them to USSR although even they did colonial cruelties is… Weird? How does one country’s colonialism become okay through others managing to do the same in a lesser extent?
How is the Russia not more dangerous than Germany or Denmark is?
As US government bonds which financed the US war machine.
Nato is to keep the Germans in and Russia out. Defence has always been secondary.
It does not. Those countries alone are already comparable to USSR while France, Britain and the US would come on top.
Denmark is pushing the internet surveillance. You know the colonial times, the cold war genocides that we ignore. If it is fascist knives out against China, it’s Denmark that made the end of democracy possible.
Germany is the US tool to reign Europe. Europe is doing the same to its population that Russia did, it just looks friendlier.
Just for clarification, you mean the old stuff?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Pact_invasion_of_Czechoslovakia
Brezhnev could have been Ukrainian. Why hold Russia accountable for that?
Because the Russia has declared itself a successor of USSR and because USSR was very ostensibly a Russian project.
Look at where Ukrainian was spoken by the majority in 1920 and where it spoken by majority now. Almost half of the Ukrainian-speaking area is gone nowadays. Because of active efforts by the Soviet Union.
Or look at what share of the population of Latvia spoke Latvian as their mother tongue in year 1930 and what share speaks it as their mother tongue now. Some people argue that what was done in the Russian part of Soviet Union (known as RSFSR back then) does not count as a regional genocide, but what USSR was doing especially in Latvia absolutely did in any case.
A country that was genociding other cultures in order to become culturally fully Russian was a Russian country that had subjucated other nations. And the Russia is a direct continuation of that.
The Russia is accountable for everything it does. That’s why it should be held accountable for its invasion of Czechoslovakia.
But hey, now you somehow forgot to answer the original request! (For your question, whether I mean the old stuff… The answer is either yes or no. I cannot know which one, because I do not know what you mean with “old stuff”. But yeah, if you want to include some definite year, then tell me which one! 🙂 I wanted to include only recent things, therefore I only looked at what has happened after WW2)
So, I’ll reiterate the request you accidentally forgot to answer: I would like you to tell what attacks Finland, Germany, Italy, Belgium and Canada have done that have been much more than the attacks against Korea, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Moldova, Ichkeria, Tajikistan, Georgia and Ukraine that the Russia has done.
For post cold war times, Russia has a hard time winning this selected comparison. Italy is active in Libya, Belgium has caused many and is still causing death with the Hutu Tutsi separation. Canada hosts many mining companies that will do stuff that is not in the news. The Fins weren’t too nice to the Sami.
The Ukraine war makes Russia the winner. Yet the Iraq war alone has created more death than Russia has caused until the Ukraine war and may still be leading in total. As mentioned above, excluding the US is cheating.
The cold war is difficult to judge. E.g. I think the USSR was asked to help in Afghanistan. So are Russians to blame for the deaths? Again, if the US is included, the numbers pale.
To me, the Russian origin is not fully clear. Stalin, a Georgian, ordered huge amounts of deportations. Breschnew, with Ukrainian roots, ordered the tanks into Czechoslovakia. My guess is that the Russians who were settled weren’t asked too much either.
Nevertheless this has led to Russian dominance and weakened national identities. It’s understandable that the countries don’t want further Russian influence.
The historic joke is that the cultural loss from TikTok reels, pop culture and globalized working conditions will be far bigger.
did it as a leader of a country aiming for converting all of multitude of nations into Russian culture and language. He was not opposed to that. Regardless of his roots, he was loyal to the project of russification.
ordered the tanks into Czechoslovakia as a leader of a country aiming for converting all of multitude of nations into Russian culture and language. He was not opposed to that. Regardless of his roots, he was loyal to the project of russification.
Now you are turning it from the junta in Kremlin to the nation of Russians. Those are waters one should not tread. Yeah, USSR was a country that did not really care about the wellbeing of individual citizens. That’s what we’re talking about here.
What cultures have seized to exist because of TikTok reels, pop culture and globalized working conditions? You are comparing things that are indeed bad to actual genocides.
There are two levels of genocide. One is to kill all people, the other is to dissolve their culture.
Excluding the USA is cheating if you want to compare what countries have been doing in the past. But you were talking about the contemporary situation. You were talking about NATO countries being a threat to the Russia now, in the 21st century. That means primarily Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, because those are the countries that would attack the Russia if there was to be an “attack by NATO”. When you are saying that NATO countries are a danger to the Russia, you are saying these five countries are the danger. Maybe add Sweden as a sixth one if you consider them to be bordering Kaliningrad because of Gotland. I already stretched a bit towards supporting your argument by adding central European countries to the list. USA is so far away from the Russia that it cannot attack it. It absolutely would want to, but it cannot.
When talking about threat to the Russia, USA is irrelevant (unless allied in an attack with some countries actually physically able to invade the Russia!). When we are talking about danger of NATO to the Russia, we are not talking about USA, because USA is on another continent. And the Russia is militarily a very different thing than Iraq or Afghanistan are. And keep in mind that in the end USA didn’t really gain anything sensible in either of those, regardless of their weakness.
When you are talking about NATO’s threat to the Russia, bringing Canada or USA into the conversation is cheating, because those are not potential aggressors, at least not main aggressors. Do not do that. Talk about the countries that would actually commit the attack and tell why those countries are a threat to the Russia. Tell why Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland would want to attack the Russia. How would it benefit them?
If the US is included in what? The only logical comparison here would be US-caused casualties in the Soviet-Afghan war vs Soviet-caused casualties in that war. But I don’t think that’s what you really meant, so a bit of clarification would be good to have!
Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, South American Banana Republics, Iran-Iraq war. You had the Korean war on Russia but it could as well be on Korea.
I have to postpone a detailed answer but want to directly mention that the US cannot be ignored. The US is able to and willing to project power. It’s also the US that made Nato countries spend 4%.
The US care about China. To contain China, China mustn’t have access to Russian resources. I expect that all the weapens that are bought for defence by the EU will be used offensively.
Yeah, Finn’s behaviour with the Sámi has not ben very nice at all. I am happy that we’ve largely changed directions, even though we still do weird shit, such as the authorities in Helsinki deciding who is allowed to count as Sámi and who not, ignoring the opinion of the actual Sámi people… But our behaviour is from a different planet compared to what the Russian Empire, USSR and the Russian Federation have been doing and is doing. There is no genocide of the Sámi people going on. Regarding Canadian mining companies I do not know enough to understand what you are referring to.
Iraqi war caused only half a million to one million casualties. How is that worse than what the Russian Empire and USSR have done to their colonies? And what the Russia has been continuing since? Even if the Russia has toned that behaviour down from the Soviet times, it is still being a horrible colonialist. And it’s the only European colonial power that has not given freedom to most of its colonies. France, England and Portugal still have some colonies here and there, but even they have let the most go. The Russia/USSR let less than one quarter of its colonized territories free in 1991. And even in those areas it continued the same behaviour France is known for in its old colonies.
There are smaller regime changes for mining rights. Canada also has their natives. Don’t those natives have less than what natives in Russia have?
I was comparing newer times. Otherwise you have to look at native Americans. My impression is that they had it worse.
In Ukraine there are far fewer casualities. Still not good, but in comparison the US looks worse.
Same for Britain while the US took over the Spanish empire.
Russia is an empire. The problem for Russia is that they can’t dissolve and regroup like the EU or with the EU because the US would grab everything and treat it like South America.
People believe in American freedom while the poor there work two jobs and don’t have dental care. People ignore recent American atrocities while they remember all the Russian ones.
Thanks to Venezuela it should be clear that there is some reason for keeping the empire together. Of course that doesn’t justify any genociding.
So… Libya’s population is now fully Italian-speaking? I mean, if Italy was doing the same magnitude of shit with Libyans that the Russia has done to the Mansi, then there are almost no speakers of languages other than Italian left in Libya. And if Italy has been doing something even worse, then that means that all non-Italian culture in Libya has been completely eradicated and the situation of Libyans is more like that of the Bering Aleuts – who no longer exist, ot like that of Mansi.
Good, I’d like to know more of what acts of genocide were committed by Italy in Libya in the 2000’s, please! You seem to be knowledged, so please do enlighten me!
Then there’s Belgium, whose part Rwanda was until July 1962. Yeah, that was evil shit! Not sure if it’s fitting to say “NATO countries” if you mean colonial stuff in early 1960’s and before. But good, here we have an example that is on par with what the Russian Empire, USSR and the Russian Federation have been doing around the 1950’s and 1960’s. I am thankful that Belgium has stopped that, although it will of course not bring the million dead back!
How does the Ukraine war make the Russia the winner in this comparison? Its death toll and the suffering caused by it is of course noteworthy, but it’s a small fraction of what the Russia has been doing. What was being done to Ukrainians until 1991 is much worse than what is going on now.
Which acts of genocide have been committed by Russia in the 2000?
Suppression was bad, but why hand over everything to the empire that segregated blacks till 1965? That’s not much further in the past but should still be more severe than how Ukrainiens are treated in Russia.