Russia’s diplomats were once a key part of President Putin’s foreign policy strategy. But that has all changed.

In the years leading up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, diplomats lost their authority, their role reduced to echoing the Kremlin’s aggressive rhetoric.

BBC Russian asks former diplomats, as well as ex-Kremlin and White House insiders, how Russian diplomacy broke down.

  • socsa@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    It’s actually hilarious how millennials are refusing to shit themselves in fear over hollow threats of nuclear apocalypse like the boomers did for decades.

    Like, I’m going to die a slow death from microplastic poisoning. My kids will slowly cook to death as the earth warms. Instant death by fireball sounds pretty nice.

    • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      10 months ago

      idk, I think I prefer the constant fear, at least compared to the bloodthirsty calls for nuclear war to begin over Ukraine because ackstually Russia’s nukes don’t work anymore, and also nuclear war isn’t really that bad anyway

        • SeventyTwoTrillion [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          10 months ago

          I’ve seen this on reddit and other hellholes from time to time

          most people tend to have a degree of separation from it, like early on in the war when people were calling for a no-fly zone over Ukraine (which would have necessarily meant NATO strikes into Ukraine or Russian territory, which would put us at the closest humanity has ever been to a nuclear exchange); about mid-way through the war when some countries were trying to form a “coalition of the willing” (article is more recent than when I was thinking though) to enter Ukraine that wasn’t technically NATO forces but like, my god, you’re really cutting it fucking close there; and some people nowadays are musing if F-16s could be used from NATO territory

          there’s also been some vague threats from time to time over Kaliningrad but luckily that’s never escalated to outright military rhetoric, at least not yet.

        • Piye
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          10 months ago

          NATO wants nuclear genocide to happen against minorities, they brag about genociding minorities all the time in fact

    • ArthurParkerhouse@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      The young scions of our age find themselves in a curious juxtaposition to their forbearers, who once trembled at the thought of world-ending calamities unleashed by the fiery engines of the Autarch’s weaponry. These newer souls scoff at such fears, deeming them hollow echoes of a past era, perhaps because they have been raised in the shadow of subtler, yet equally inexorable, dooms. To them, the threat of slow ruin wrought by the invisible maladies that pollute our waters and air, or the gradual inferno that the Sun’s ever-increasing wrath promises to our world, hold more tangible dread. For these youths, the prospect of instantaneous annihilation in a blaze of cosmic fire seems almost a reprieve, a quick severance of life’s Gordian knot, sparing them the prolonged suffering promised by the ills that plague our slowly deteriorating Urth.