Not necessarily replaced by anyone better or more reasonable actually. It's a viper's nest of nutters.
Every single politician, high ranking military officers and journalist in Russia must smoke that much weed they are paranoid as ****. I couldn’t give a rats arse about Russia as long as they stay within their boundaries. There isn’t one shred of evidence that the West wants to destroy Russia, nor would there be any benefit. Let’s be honest if the West wanted to, it could quite easily run through the Russian Army, AKA the Keystone Corps (see what I did there) that is defending them. Yet they all think woe is me. What a world to live in eh? A world where you think everyone is against you, hate you and you pretend not to care that much that you just invade your neighbours. This war, whether they win it or not has shown them to be well short of any military capability beyond its own borders, with the exception of nuclear warheads. The ****ing irony of Putin claiming yesterdays antics were criminal, yeah I suppose Russians moving in a convoy on a Russian road is a lot more criminal than Russian convoys moving along a Ukrainian Road. Or when they claim Ukrainian missiles are hitting Russian towns. Well roll over Alexander the meerkat you practice what you preach.
I'm waiting for the unfortunately story of the death of the wagner leader who fell out of his apartment on the 10th floor
I reckon it could turn out to be a con. Wagner were 200km from Moscow and 24hrs later they are in Belarus 100km from Kyiv, relocated along a safe corridor.
I reckon Lukashenko , fed up of being told what to do by Putin , is now greasing up to and offering help to Prigozhin .
It's the oldest trick in the dictator's book. Frighten the people and tell them you, and only you, can protect them. Russia has never in it's history had a semblance of democracy, and has constantly gravitated towards a "strong man" leader. This never works out well in the end. The country can never recover from this. It has lost maybe 100,000 young men, more than that injured, and more than double that, perhaps as many as three times that have fled. Those fleeing are largely educated, qualified, skilled, have money and are energetic. They are the last people you want to lose. This can't be put right. Russia has for some time now had a declining population, but the demographic time bomb it faced a year and a half ago, will become an atom bomb inside a generation.
****ing ****e Russians man. The worst 10 day special operations in the history of mankind and now the most feeble armed rebellion known to man. Christ Almighty, the Branch Davidians held out longer and only lost cos their curtains caught on fire
I don't know what happened with the Wagner rebellion or even if it was a rebellion. Security services went into Wagner HQ and bagged loads of cash and God only knows what else. Maybe they also got to bank accounts and also detain family members. Whilst I don't doubt that the cash would have been a fraction of the group's wealth it is possible that Putin's security services (including state hackers) got to a large proportion of their wealth worldwide. Via access either made when they took Wagner's offices or the culmination of long time actions conducted to provide some way to rein-in the group should they start acting against Putin's interests. The whole thing just seems too contrived - if you want to kill a snake you start at the head, not its tail and the best way to get to it is by stealth - lay a trap or sneak up on it. Shoigu has been in place 10yrs or so and you have got to expect he has managed to build all sorts of self protection mechanisms in that time so maybe the rebellion was Putin's way to get rid of him. I just think we saw what we were supposed to see and we don't know the real story.
After the latest publicity disaster, attacking the power station as a false flag operation is exactly something the lunatic would do.
Mihail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. These two made a fair start, but The Party was too well entrenched to let go for long. Although it has been argued that if Gorbachev had not 'given ' Crimea to Ukraine, we would not have had the current sorry War. On the other hand, without him, the the whole of the USSR not have been dismantled and the Iron Curtain Countries have been free to chose their own future. If the current situation in Ukraine shows anything even remotely possitive, it is that Putin's dream of a return of the 'Old USSR' is an impossibility. War won't achieve it, and I don't suppose that trying a 'Charm Offensive' could ever occur any member of The Praesidium
Yes, they had a short lived go at it. Almost impossible though when a population has been conditioned by seventy years of communism. And of course, some people really, mostly older, didn't want freedom as we know it as it was too great a leap into the dark. Much like many slaves at one point did not hanker after it, when it became clear the freedom also meant the freedom to starve. It's a volatile mess certainly, but one long-term consequence I think will be that those Ukranians who felt "Russian" or warmly towards Russia will now be a tiny number. Putin, like all dictators, gets bad information from acolytes eager for favour. It has led him into a catastrophic mistake and his country, far from bestriding Europe with his assumed Russian exceptionalism, will face awful and quite rapid decline.
It was under Nikita Krushchev that Crimea was transferred to Ukraine from being an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. The transfer wasn't a personal act, it was agreed by a vote of the entire Presidium of the USSR Suppreme Soviet, not just the General Secretary or even the Politburo. The transfer was mainly because it had proven too dificult to provide services to an expanding population in Crimea from the Kuban in the Russian SFSR, whilst the Ukrainian SSR was already building hydroelectric dams to secure water & electricity and had built direct road and rail transport links. Crimea regained autonomy within Ukrainian SSR IN 1990, transferring to autonomy within Independent Ukraine by referendum of 1991.
A couple of RAF Typhoons, in international waters over the black sea just stretching their wings, minding their own business had the Russians ****ting themselves earlier on. 2 of our jets and Putin probably thought he was toast.
Thanks for the correction on the original transfer. MEMO to self. Stop relying on your failing memory, when it only takes minutes to Fact-Check.
We should have sent a dozen f35s for a flyby. Putin would have had kittens......or maybe not because he wouldn't have seen them coming, observing or leaving in the blink of an eye.... Or maybe we did......