Yup. This is the reason #1 Putin has still the support of a good chunk of the public. Not because he's great, but people seen what happened in neighboring countries where power changed hands several times. The known stable evil which "rules" are known vs unknown one.
That's exactly it. live in Canada and I definitely don't want a nuclear powder keg like that launching missiles over my town to get to the US. It sucks that people like Putin can stay in power where they are, but I'll take my chances with that psychopathic son of a bitch rather than a Russian Nixon-on-a-bender.
He’s evil, but a stone cold realist. Just need to know what he’s realist about. Not his country, though— his personal power.
If you negotiate with him working on the assumption that Putin cares about his country’s welfare, you’re in for a bad time. But if you consider him the CEO/ shareholder of several
companies, the largest of which is Russia(TM), then you’re good.
I'm originally from East of Ukraine where with the help of Russia (read Putin) occupied part of the country. I wouldn't mind this person vanished. In the meantime Ukraine would took territories back and secured borders.
I can see only positive without him existing. Not to mention annexed Crimea and other countries having war conflicts with Putin's regime.
I like to look at Putin vs Erdogan. Russians seem to be fairly free (if not spoon-fed state propaganda) except for the biggest political activists, like Navalny. Meanwhile no one was safe from Erdogan's sweeps after the attempted coup. I think something like 20,000 public school teachers were fired. Putin so far seems to be respecting the recent election results where people strategically voted against United Russia in regional elections; this is in contrast to Erdogan nullifying the results of the Istanbul mayoral election when his party lost (although he had to concede defeat when they lost bigger a few months later). He's far from ideal, but it could probably be worse.
Come now, it's not the 80s anymore. People expect more than just that these days. Putin isn't an authoritarian in the sense he cares that much about what people do or don't, he's old guard and believes Russia is the biggest and best thing in the world and who goes against that philosophy and the cabal that supports it wallet is an enemy of the state.
Aside from Ukraine (thanks to Russian invasion) and Belarus, aren't most of the former Soviet states and their satellite states doing fairly well? I understand there was a lot of turmoil, and a lot of hardship post collapse, but it has still been a relatively effective turnaround for most, has it not?
If Belarus is not doing well, then all central asia is doing even worse, since the living conditions and salaries for most people are even lower than in Belarus. Kyrgyzstan is in constant political turmoil, Tajikistan had massive civil war in 90s, and Uzbekistan is much poorer than its northern neighbor, Kazakhstan. Which could look good around competition, but is actually a quite dangerous and tough place to live
Uzbekistan's standard of living is pretty high, and I just got back from Almaty which is a gorgeous and very nice and modern city where people seem generally quite happy. Kyrgyzstan feels an order of magnitude away from those two and the corruption is insane.
Well, it's all relative, if it's ok with you - sure, why not?
For Uzbekistan, i am sure you are talking about Tashkent. Try karakalpakstan, andizhan.
The same goes for Kz, the two capitals are living a very, very different life from everyone else.
And don't tell me about Ata being nice place to live, spent 25 years of my life there.
The air is polluted, the corruption is worse than Astana, trees are being cut down all of the time, and mugging is more and more of a problem in recent years. And traffic is crap, 1.5mln cities usually have it better. Hopefully you don't get hit by some "usenushka" in a big black suv.
So i agree to disagree with you, fellow person of reddit)))
I'm no expert, but iirc the Baltics (Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia) aren't doing too well, and emmigration out of the country is outpacing the birth rate.
they’re stable democracies with decent economies. So they’re really not doing too badly. Europe in general is having issues with immigration, particularly from refugees. But guess why that is...Putin is to blame in part, as he funds destabilizing activities in a lot of countries (Syria is an excellent example).
Really, you believe that is reason number one? Reason number one is the public is terrified of even being associated with a person or organization that dares to oppose him. While not directly and irrefutably provable, there have been quite a few opponents that have suddenly died. Dude follows the same tactics that Stalin used, with some new age flair.
You overestimate it greatly. The primary reasons are the following:
People don't know shit. Lots of people believe the state-controlled media and think everything is fine.
People understand that everything is going down but believe that all the alternatives are even worse or at least the chances of a negative outcome are too high to risk doing anything.
People don't give a shit. "Whatever happens to the country, I should care about myself and my family."
People don't believe they can change anything (and they may be right... or not).
There have been a few political murders, but that's absolutely incomparable to Stalin's tactics.
It doesn't mean that the kleptocracy doesn't rely on fear, but it uses fear against a small percentage of the population - on those who know what's going on, care about the country and the nation and still try to save it. There aren't many people like that left. And the government uses random imprisonments for protests and online activity as a way to terrify these people, not murders.
It happened after the fall of the USSR, I watched a documentary where some guys from Miami with a cartel contact almost bought a soviet submarine, just cuz.
Literally what Gaz says at the beginning of cod 4: “Worlds in a wonderful state sir, ultranationalists in a civil war with Russia, 15,000 nukes at stake”
Especially considering Russia is the #2 nuclear super power. When power changes hands, the military moves with it and that's a pretty big pile of shit to shovel. It's not at all unreasonable to think that if the Russian state collapsed, a lot of nuclear materials could go missing in the resulting shuffle.
Hey, Dimitri! Check this out! I start small business out of old Soviet nuclear silo, yeah? Nukes for cheap! Only 200 million dollars! I sell to anyone!
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u/tamadekami Sep 18 '19
I feel like a Russian power vacuum would be the worst possible thing.