Deflecting from Russia’s misdeeds by bringing up China. How much Russian propaganda are you consuming yourself? Everything you say is very much in Russia’s playbook. Down to the t.
If you truly want to avoid some kind of catastrophic war, perhaps you should think about what Russia should be doing to end its own agression, rather than putting all of the responsibility on the US.
Because: Eastern Ukraine, Malaysian Airliner, Georgia (the Country), Novochik, Polonium
You keep saying that the US is crap. So what is Russia then? A teddy bear? At the very least, hold Russia to the same standard as you hold the US.
And the list goes on and on. And whatever the answer to all of this may be, it is certainly not to say, “We have to let Russia do whatever it wants because they have nukes, so to do otherwise would bring about the destruction of humanity.”
Saying, “If you poke the bear, it will kill us all,” does not speak well of the bear, especially when the bear is already attacking livestock.
This is one of the reasons that Putin and his tame oligarchs hate the various Magnitsky laws to the degree that they engage in risky and illegal backroom deals (e.g. the meeting with Biff’s minions re: Russia’s retaliatory adoption laws).
Being a kleptocrat or accomplished thug-for-hire means that one will eventually have to pull some money out of whatever corrupt and autocratic country conditionally granted one that largesse and invest or save it inside stable liberal democracies (which countries also tend to be the ones that produce status goods and real estate that wealthy people like to buy). These laws prevent them from doing that and freeze whatever assets they currently have in the West.
As a workaround, they’ve had to pay a premium to slimeball offshore bankers* in places like the Caymans, who do their laundering, set up shell corporations, and act as a repository for their ill-gotten gains. They’ve grudgingly paid that price to circumvent the laws because they’ve counted on some degree of governmental stability, manageable corruption, and free flow of capital through those backdoors. As you note, that’s changing.
[* who, as a side note, secretly love the Magnitsky acts and the behaviours they were formulated to punish, even as they pretend to commiserate with their scumbag clients about the unfairness of pointing out the nasty elements of the Putin regime and grouse about these laws making their cushy jobs slightly more difficult. This is why these parasites try to excuse all the murders, theft, and covert interference Western elections with ridiculously and transparently fallacious arguments like Vlad’s old standby, Whataboutism.]
It’s only attractive if you’re wealthy and privileged enough that don’t have to actually move there. In 2018, Gerard Depardieu famously gave up his French passport and changed his residence to Russia to avoid taxes. However, I get the feeling that over the past three years he’s spent a lot more time in Paris than he has in Novosibirsk.
I highly doubt that Russia was Edward Snowden’s first choice for political asylum – just the most expedient one under duress. In contrast, Assange, if he managed to slip away again, knows he’d receive a hero’s welcome and lots of cash from the Shirtless Wonder and would head straight for Moscow.
As much as these creeps have to fear from Vlad and his malign influence when they’re no longer useful to him, the system that supports them is currently under even greater threat from Winnie the Pooh’s crackdown. The cash flow from Chinese kleptocrats trying to get their money out is already drying up, as are the shady bankers’ fat commissions and fees. In the coming years, I fully expect China to buy up political leaders in these tax havens to ensure that their oligarchs’ accounts mainly exist as honeypots (Winnie likes those!) and to punish bankers who don’t play ball.
So, getting back to my original point, honest reportage would help the people in the RF by objectively exposing corruption or episodes of oppression, especially censorship, in their country. That is something Wikileaks could have done, and seldom seems to do. My personal hoped for result would be a better informed citizenry would make better leadership choices, same as I’d hope for the US or anywhere else in the world. Or, at the very least, the corrupt politicians would be on slightly better behavior if they knew the eyes of their citizens, and the world, were on them. Conflating reporting honestly about leadership in Russia with attacking the people of Russia is disingenuous.
