Tuuktuuk

Putin suggested the economic union from Atlantic to Pacific. He must know that it will lead to a dissolution of the nations so he can’t be that hung up on Russia.

Dissolution of what nations?

To mention one thing, the USSR must have insisted on controlling the Suwałki gap

Suwałki gap did not exist when Soviet Union did.
Suwałki gap is the border area between Poland and Lithuania. It’s a narrow stretch of land with the Kaliningrad enclave of the Russia on one side and Russia-controlled Belarus on the other side.
During the Soviet times Lithuania was a part of USSR, meaning that it was not a gap between two parts of USSR, just a short and insignificant part of the long Soviet-Polish border.

How is the Suwałki gap supposed to prevent a war? A war between Belarus and the Russia?

Making an internet search for putin doesn’t use internet brings a lot of results from 2023, but I did read about it around the mid-to-late 2022. It was told by a person I do trust, but I cannot find the precise source now, over 3 years afterwards.

Still, if you read through the various articles you find with that search, they together give a reasonable good image of what’s going on. (Beware, of course, that many of the sites are more than just fishy!)
Sorry for not taking time to dig through them more precisely!

I cannot imagine that much ignorance.

The thing is, Putin has made a decision to never use Internet for anything. He has never done anything in it, because for him it’s a tool full of propaganda. His first contact with Internet was that his underlings were able to shape opinions across the globe extremely efficiently using Internet. He doesn’t want his brain to rot like that, so he absolutely refuses to use Internet.

Now, what sources exist for him, then? He doesn’t know what he is missing, so he is unaware of how pervasively all information exchange takes place over Internet.
Putin gets his information from TV-news, newspapers and from assistants that he has meticulously hand-picked, personally. He knows his own TV and newspapers are full of propaganda and therefore not very useful as sources. And he seems to honestly assume the same applies, to the same high extent, even, to foreign media as well. That means, he is basically left at his most trusted assistants for all information. He vets new recruits against the earlier ones: If the new one is telling things that are in agreement with what the older assistants, he can be trusted. If not, he has been compromised by American propaganda.

Also, it’s good to keep in mind where Putin comes from. He was the second child of a single-mother. The first child died, largely of hunger, during the siege of Leningrad. They had no food there, which meant that cannibalism was very common. You can figure out what happened to a child that died at a young age in that city. It’s either: He gets buried and another child starves. Or the other child is given food that will keep it alive. A single mother traumatized by such an experience, in post-war USSR in devastated northwestern USSR. No time for the child, really. The guy grew on the streets. And there’s nobody who doesn’t get traumatized by that kind of an experience.

Because of this personal history, Putin really believes deeply in the concept of thugs being able to trust other thugs. Because of his early development, where he has had to play the role of an adult at an age when he should still have been an innocent child for many more years, his brain is wired differently than that of an adult without a traumatic background. He truly does not understand that the people around him who lie to everyone else, also lie to him. And because of his vetting system, he has ended up hiring only assistants that coördinate their lies with the other assistants. If anyone steps away from the line and starts saying something different, Putin knows that the assistant has been compromised by CIA and fires him. And when Putin fires an assistant, that also means that the assistant’s children will lose their study places, etc. The family’s life will be derailed completely. That’s a type of a punishment for betrayal.

So, Putin seriously is entirely disconnected from real world actions. He gets information from his assistants, but has personally made sure that they all lie. And that they lie all the time. At the same time, Putin is giving orders that must be implemented verbatim. He gets information that there are 1000 soldiers in the centre of Pokrovsk and then he gives an order for 150 of them do some specific thing. And in reality there are 30 soldiers, and they are at the outskirts of Pokrovsk. Yet the command will be relayed and implemented verbatim. And then those 30 soldiers die for nothing.

I do not think “ignorance” is really the correct word for this phenomenon, though. So, in the end I do agree with you, in a way.

Trump wouldn’t have sent arms like Javelins to Ukraine in 2018 and he would have stopped messing around in Syria.

Putin had no reason to stop Trump from doing that.
Remember, until February 2022 Putin knew that Ukraine will become a part of the Russia in 2022. He had a lot of intel from actual Ukrainians living in Ukraine. He had spent billions for bribing various Ukrainian military officials. He knew that those Javelins will all be in the inventory of the Russian armed forces in spring 2022. Why would Putin have forbidden Trump from sending them?

Of course, Putin had not understood how much 2014 changed the Ukrainian thinking. The Russia was still more or less a friend until that. After it attacked Crimea, it absolutely was not. And suddenly very very few people would coöperate with the Russia even to the least extent. It’s difficult to explain how abrupt the change was! It was not possible for Putin to understand what had actually taken place, because the Russian heart is so very different from the Ukrainian heart. Russians would never have had a Maidan. It would absolutely not fit the Russian culture to do anything like that. The feelings behind that were simply unfathomable for a member of the nation Putin hails from. But in any country there are a few percents of the population that really wants to see shit where there is none. And those felt uncomfortable in Ukraine. And those people really did think their country was going to hell and that’s what they told Russians. That was really how for example Medvechuk saw things. While extremely unrepresentative of Ukrainians, those people were practically 100 % of those who gave any intel to the Russia.

And of course…
Putin rules through corruption. He gives people power by electing that for certain people no corruption will ever be noticed by the authorities. And at the same, he has the power to make the authorities see the corruption whenever Putin needs to get rid of those people. But if you choose only public officials who are corrupt, of course they will steal all the billions they were supposed to use in Ukraine. Especially since Putin told everyone around him, even Shoigu, that there will not be an attack against Ukraine – that everything is just training for the worst of the worst case scenarios. Preparation in case that EU goes crazy and attacks. And everybody knew EU won’t attack and they trusted Putin when he said he has absolutely no plans to attack anything in the western direction.

But yeah, Putin has done his homework. He had made a lot of effort to get it right. And therefore he knew it doesn’t matter what weapons Ukraine has. He “knew” that Ukrainians overwhelmingly want to join the Russia and he “knew” that all military districts in Ukraine had been bought with those billions he had spewed there. The more weapons Ukraine gets in 2018, the more weapons the Russia has in 2022 when it’s time for the next step of the plan – the Suwałki gap, next to which there had been several very very big wargames when the future events of 2022 seemed crystal clear to Putin.
It’s just… Sometimes you put a huge effort into your homework and still get a wildly incorrect answer, if you have unknowingly slept through the most crucial lessons.

They used to have a specific strategy for accomplishing this:
The USA provided military security for Europe so that Europe would not have any need to spend money for military. The USA’s goal was to minimize EU countries’ military spending so that USA would remain an uncontested military hegemon. That gives it a lot of influence that can be translated into actual cash.

At the same time, EU countries saved several percents of their GDP and could use it for the good of their own populations. It was a win-win situation.

But then the Russia organized this movement called “MAGA”, and that movement successfully cancelled the arrangement. (Funnily enough, the abbreviation “maga” comes from “make America great again”, which would suggest strategies for increasing USA’s influence, not diminishing it. But what do I know.)

The Internet Archive rewrites people’s home instances?! Wut?

Germans

Mehr als ein Fünftel der Einwohnern in der EU sprechen Deutsch als Muttersprache. Durchwegs zu erwarten also!

Jedoch sind gar nicht alle deutschsprachige Deutscher! Calling all German-speakers German is like calling all English-speakers American.

Liberal and Liberalist are two different terms, though. Very few liberalists are liberal.

If you support basic human rights, liberalism is diametrically opposed to your thinking. You can’t have human rights if Nestlé is allowed to own all the ground water underneath your village.

Here’s an article on where the Proton checkbox is in the Steam settings. Just now I’m playing CIV4 and I had completely forgotten to think that it probably doesn’t work on Linux. Because it does now, absolutely fine :)

(The original FFVII doesn’t, though. But that’s the only Windows game I’ve encountered to not work!)

If you use Steam, there’s an option in the settings to always enable using Proton to handle Windows games. Works very well! Many games work faster than on Windows, but sometimes there are minor bugs.

I find that vertical panels are inconvenient because text is horizontal so less text gets shown and font sizes get smaller.

Another solution is to simply switch to using the Mongolian script.

It’s not about what China wants or doesn’t.

These bonds are sold to Russian civilians. Their idea is that they are a bit like tax, but the state will pay them back after the war – state bonds are a very secure investment. You give the state one million Rubbles and you know you’ll get back the same one million Rubbles plus a tiny tiny interest atop it. A very secure place to save your money.

It is a very interesting, and surprising, thing that they elected to denominate those bonds in Yuans instead of their own currency! Basically this means that people in the Russia don’t trust the stability of their country’s currency and would not buy the bonds if they were denominated in Russian Rubbles. They would believe that when they get their money back by selling the bond back to the state, the money will not be enough to pay a quarter of a loaf of bread, even if when they invested it, it was enough to furnish a home.

If the bonds are denominated in Rubbles, then the state will never be in trouble with them.
But now, with these ones being in Yuans: If the Rubble collapses, the bonds will retain their value. If the bond is worth 10 000 Yuans, then you pay their current value in Rubbles, which is a bit under 1 000 000 Rubbles. Then, if the value of the Rubble collapses, you still get 10 000 Yuans plus a very small interest back, but in the newly devaluated Rubbles that might be 1 000 000 000 Rubbles and ABRACADABRA: you have multiplied your money by one thousand. Good for you.
Except that…
If that happens, then how the heck is the Russia supposed to pay back those bonds? If you get one million and you need to pay back one billion, you’ve done a damn bad deal. And you will go bankrupt and you won’t pay back a thing.

So, if the Russia assumes that Russians won’t want to buy the bonds if they are denominated in Rubbles, why would they buy them if they are nominated in a foreign currency? It’s a safe investment because you know you will get your money back for sure. But in the case of the Russia, you don’t know that.

Of course, those bonds can be bought by anyone, not only Russian citizens. If China buys them, they can use those bonds to blackmail the Russia in the future: “If you don’t do as we say, we will sell you back your bonds and you will go bankrupt.”

So: All in all, it makes no sense for Russians to buy these bonds, but for China it does make sense.

So… If the Rubble loses much of its value, then the Russia won’t be able to pay these back at all?