Pretty gross. Comments every bit as awful as you’re thinking. Just a reminder of the abysmal state of non-cishet rights and acceptance in Russia.
Edit: can’t get my screenshot to load properly so text:
T1: Putin on accusations against Russia in the energy crisis: “European countries are big specialists in non-traditional relationships and themselves abandoned traditional energy sources in favor of non-traditional ones”
T2: (“non-traditional relationships” is the legal term in Russia for all things “LGBT”)
When Russia provided military aid to Venezuela at the request of Maduro to resist the coup attempt, the US media called it Russian imperialism, but that seems more like anti-imperialism to me.
I mean that’s siding with anti-imperialism for realpolitik reasons but it’s still for the sake of cracking up US hegemony to allow Russian ascendancy. The invasion of Ukraine has made it more than apparent that Putin sees Russia as having a sphere of influence where it can dictate terms for the nations around it and will enforce that understanding violently. That’s textbook imperialism akin to the early US dictating terms in Latin America.
And yea that’s all because Russia was rejected from the kool kids (k)table at nato but the response has not been to adopt a left wing anti-imperialist stance
The invasion of Ukraine has little to do with “dictating terms” or creating a sphere of influence, they’re protecting their own country from imperial USA which has spent most of the last decade militarizing Ukraine after engineering a coup there to make the government rabidly anti-russia. I’m sorry but it’s bananas to compare the Ukraine situation to the US/Latin America relationship and its equally ridiculous to call actions which are clearly anti-imperialist in their effects just the same as imperialism because of whatever you imagine the motivation for those actions to be. This is how we get things like claims of Cuban imperialism.
Caring about intent is idealism, caring about outcomes is materialism. You don’t have to like Putin to realize we have to work with him (we, as in the global left and AES) and that he has been a reliable ally
:yikes-1: :yikes-2: :yikes-3:
if putin wants to help us that’s great, we’ll take it, but if he ever comes around asking for anything, fuck him, he’s got feet and he can kick rocks.
I mean if you’re in a global south country that the US doesn’t like or care about, you’re kind of forced to work with Russia and Putin, as much as it sucks. See Venezuela, Cuba, etc. China is non interventionist so it’s not an option.
Sometimes the outcomes are good, sometimes they are shit.
Not the opinion of Xi, Maduro, Kim, Diaz-Canal or any other socialist leader
I’m sure that Vlad is devastated that he cant rely on the proven track record of the Western Left.